Wizards of Waverly Place  Horror Movie
by Thor2000
Summary: Hollywood is interested in using the Waverly Street Sub Station as a location to film a movie, one that sounds eerily similar to Justin and Alex's lives as young wizards. Just who knows their secret and can Alex stop the movie from being made?
1. Chapter 1

At the corner of Waverly Place and Lafayette a few blocks from Tribeca Prep, the traffic was back up for ten blocks in nearly every direction. A taxicab had swerved to miss a humvee going through the light and had smashed up the side of a delivery truck before driving over a fire hydrant. The cab driver was a Rastafarian black man in the garb of his native country standing face to face to the tall bald guy out of the truck and they were yelling face to face at each other. Down the block, the police got as close as they could, radioed for the tow truck to move the disabled cab and made an attempt to defuse the situation. Meanwhile, the uncapped fire hydrant was spraying in every direct from the underside of the taxicab. Something eventually gave and the steel underside of the cab was broken free as three hundred pounds of water under force now started coming up through the bottom of the cab, now filling it up with water. Thirty-nine year old Aswang Obadji, a naturalized American citizen from the Sudan, looked over and started stressing out as truck driver Carl Deacon started laughing. First the accident, now the insult, this day was getting worse and worse….

From the curb, a number of students were traveling from Tribeca Prep toward the Waverly Place housing area. Lisa and Rachel Dawson lived above their mother's flower shop and smelled the scents wafting from the Italian restaurant next door. They stopped to shoot pictures of the flooding cab with their camera phones then continued on their way. Wild-haired Jackie Condon, the son of a former child star, stood and laughed with Jerry McFarland, a resident of the apartment house above the hardware store. They were waiting to see if the cab filled up completely in case the windows exploded. Monica Hyneman and her boyfriend, Cal Savage, stood and waited to see if Deacon and Obadji were going to launch into a fight. It seemed the altercation was going to come to blows, but New York's finest were just trying to get the area cleared and the traffic going. Coming up from behind them, Justin Russo waved good-bye from his friends from the Chess Club going one way then turned and noticed the accident. The water in the cab was reaching up to the windows and Obadji was stressing at the site of it, screaming at the police to do something. Cars were honking and waiting their turn to go through the green light. Feeling a bit like Clark Kent from the comic books, Justin stepped behind the van at curbside and secretly pulled a small stick from his pack. A few silent words under his breath and the cab rolled backward off the curb and through a sudden space in the street. The geyser of water under it exploded up twenty feet for one minute then shut off completely. Obadji looked once and then again quickly as his vehicle rolled to a stop next to him; it's door popping open and vomiting a minor deluge of water at Deacon's feet. A minor crisis averted, brunette haired Monica suddenly noticed Justin popping up out of nowhere from behind the van and passing by the movie rental place onward to the coffee place on the other side of the alley. Beyond that was the Waverly Street Sub Station that Justin's parents owned.

"You will not believe what is going on up the street!" He announced entering the restaurant. There were seven customers in the shop, one of them a mother with children and another was a guy hiding behind his laptop on the table before him. His mother, Theresa, was waiting on tables as his father stood at his post in the window of the kitchen, pushing through the lunch for the mother. At a side table, his sister was sitting lengthwise across the seat with her best friend, Harper, sitting up straight checking her e-mails on her telephone. He also had a brother named Max who was off somewhere else at the moment.

"Let me guess…" Alex Russo dropped her magazine to acknowledge her brother. "Uh… something happened?"

"Yes, something happened…" Justin crossed the room behind the guy on the laptop, paused at the guys monitor and recognized the image on it. "Dude, how many images do you need with my sister's head photo-shopped on to Jennifer Love Hewitt's body?"

The unidentified patron grabbed up his laptop and the last of his lemonade and was rushing out of the place as Alex dropped her jaw and watched him vanishing out on to the street.

"Anyway…." Justin continued as Alex went chasing after the guy with the laptop. "A cab got sideswiped by a Humvee and drove over the fire hydrant. Big mess, water everywhere, but the police seem to be getting it cleaned up."

"Was anyone hurt?" His mother looked up.

"No…" Justin took a free cookie from the glass jar on the counter by the cash register. "Not that I could tell…"

"We've been having a lot more accidents here since they closed Lexington and re-routed the traffic through here." Harper came over and stood by Justin's side. "How long does it take to repair a collapsed sewer line? They should have reopened Lexington months ago."

"Harper…" Jerry Russo looked out from the kitchen. "This is a place where people eat. Don't talk about sewers here, and another thing, Lexington has only been closed for five weeks."

"Really?" She mad a face of embarrassed confusion. "It seems much longer."

"I couldn't catch him…." Out of breath, Alex came wandering back into the shop and strolled past the mother and two other customers toward her brother. "Okay, Justin, who's the guy with the laptop?"

"What guy?" Justin looked confused. "What laptop?" He paused and looked around the shop. "Anyway, dad… you know how I hate asking you for money."

"And I respect that."

"The guys in the chess league want to attend the Grand Chess League Tournaments in Orlando, but we can't afford the bus tickets." Justin looked to his mother and then back to his father. "Is it okay if we try and sell some of the junk we got here for cash?"

"Justin," Alex pulled her brother to face her. "Who was the guy with the laptop?"

"Like Alex…" Justin continued his thought. "I know she's not worth very much, but I'm sure we might be able to get something for her."

His sister started making a face at him.

"I don't know, Justin…" Jerry exited the kitchen thinking about the situation. Behind Theresa, a tall full-figured redhead had entered the sandwich shop and was standing looking around. "A lot of the old antiques have you-know-what on them…" He clandestinely referred to the family secret. "They could be dangerous if they got into the wrong hands."

The redhead had pulled out her camera phone and was openly snapping images of the interior. She snapped images of Harper with the Russos and then the surroundings.

"Justin, I'm warning you…" Alex faced her brother down. "Who was that guy and what's he doing with faked pictures of me?"

"Alex…" Justin exhaled disinterestedly and pretended to placate her. "I don't know. I don't care!"

"Hey, look at these pictures some guy uploaded of Alex onto the Internet!" Max Russo, the absent sibling, came down the stairway from the upstairs apartment carrying his laptop ahead of him. A big laughing grin on his face, he pushed past Justin and set his laptop down before his family as Alex's eyes rounded in shock and her jaw dropped embarrassed.

"You know, I can't get exactly figure it out…" Max was genuinely confused. "But she seems taller and much more…" He looked at the front of her many-colored shirt and back to the image. "Besides, when was Alex ever to the beach?"

Jerry caught the image of his daughter as a mature bikini clad beach goer and pushed his son's laptop closed.

"I'm going to find this guy and then I'm going to photo-shop his head on to Jennifer Love Hewitt!" Alex pulled her wand out with a psychotic look in her face. Harper meanwhile reopened Max's laptop and was scrolling through the images, stopping at someone else she recognized.

"So that's what I'd look like if I lost a few pounds…" She looked to Justin. "What do you think, Justin?"

Justin just pushed the monitor closed once again. Despite the fact that Harper said she was over him, she was still reverting back to her old infatuations.

"Hello, welcome to our sub shop." Theresa had come over to assist their red-haired customer. "How can we help you?"

"Hi…" Their voluptuous guest pulled a car out from her shirt pocket in her white sweater, handing it to Theresa between her fore finger and index finger where Jerry accepted it. "Donna Prepone, the locations director for Orion Studios…. I'm scouting local restaurants in the area for a movie being filmed. Have you ever considered letting your restaurant being used in the movies?"

"A movie?" Jerry looked at her card then crossed his arms before his chest; the kids behind him had drawn quiet and briefly forgotten about the voyeuristic fantasies of the phantom blogger. "What kind of movie?"

"Well, it is a horror movie…." Prepone postured a bit and tossed her long red locks back. "Most of it is being filmed at a location out on Staten Island, but the opening introductory scenes do involve two teens whose parents own a restaurant. Would you be interested in allowing the studio to film here if your location is chosen?"

Jerry and Theresa looked at each other to get the other's reactions.

"We do offer restitution for the use of your property?" Prepone mentioned.

"Ka-Ching!" Justin had found the money for his trip to Orlando and imitated a cash register with a big grin.

"And we leave your place just exactly as we found it." Prepone continued.

"How much…" Jerry cleared his throat. "…restitution are we talking here?"

"You can pull anywhere from five hundred thousand to one million for the use of the location."

"Ka-Ching!" Alex, Justin, Harper and Max all imitated a cash register with their arms pulling down the arms of invisible slot machines.

"Here's a description of the movie…" Prepone pulled a flier from a journal on a strap swinging under her arm. "It's a synopsis of the movie and its characters… You can peruse it if you like and if you're interested, call me on my card and we'll be in touch."

"Thank you very much…" Theresa couldn't stop grinning as Donna turned and headed out waving goodbye. Once she was gone, she and Jerry started jumping up and down excitedly as if they were kids.

"Jerry, we can finally go on a real vacation!"

"Yeah!" Jerry's heart was beating faster. "And finally restart our savings account!"

"Excuse me," Alex looked disgusted and raised her hand. "But, uh, we're going to get some of that cash too, aren't we?"

"What?" Jerry reacted confused and distracted as the mother dining behind him came to pay her bill. "Oh, sure… sure…" He and his wife looked at each other grinning uncontrollably.

"This sounds like a great movie!" Teresa gave their customer her receipt and held up the typed movie synopsis. "_Bride of Darkness_… it's even got a spooky name!" She read the outline aloud. "Jason and Ashley Russell are the children of a former stage magician who have inherited his magical powers. Jason is the tall handsome All-American boy who always does the right thing; Ashley is the attractive lazy troublemaker who tries the patience of their parents, Larry and Terri Russell, who own a Manhattan hamburger shop. Their other daughter is Maxine Russell, an unpredictable youngster of limited intelligence…" Theresa looked up to Jerry as Justin looked to Alex and then to Max and Harper. "This is starting to sound oddly familiar…."

"Let me see that!" Justin took the paper from his mother. "Their other daughter is Maxine Russell, an unpredictable youngster of limited intelligence…" He picked up where his mother left off. "When Jason decides to throw a party with his friends at Highfield Hall, a local haunted mansion, Ashley and her best friend, Hannah Dinkle, crash the party where Ashley taps into the dark energies of the house for a pact with the Devil to become even more powerful than even her brother….."

"That's going to be a great movie!" Max lit up. "I can't wait to see it!"

"Max…" Harper looked over to the scatter-brained youth. "The characters are based on us!"

"Harper, I think you're a bit mixed up." The younger Russo scoffed a bit and took the synopsis. "It said the youngest Russell kid is a girl named Max…." He lost his grin as the revelation slowly soaked into his brain. "I'm a girl in the movie?"

"Jerry!" Theresa snatched the synopsis back. "This movie is based on our lives!"

"Theresa, don't get hysterical." Jerry tried to figure out what was happening. "As far as we know, Alex has never made a pact with the Devil…."

They looked at their daughter. Alex reacted offended at their looks.

"As far as we know…."

Alex responded with disgusted annoyance.

"Maybe it's all just one big coincidence!" He really wanted that money.

"Jerry…." Theresa re-read the synopsis getting pulled around. "A magical family who live over a restaurant with a well-behaved son and a rotten daughter… No offense, Alex… with a third child who has the same name as ours? This is not a coincidence!"

"It could be!"

"Oh, really…." Theresa slipped him the movie synopsis. "Read the bottom…."

"Okay…." Jerry mugged a bit and read the bottom. "Let's see here, Justin Bieber as Jason Russell…."

"Below that…." Theresa instructed.

"Personally, I'd prefer Zac Efron…" Justin announced out loud.

"Mikayla as Ashley Russell…."

Alex dropped her head in disgrace to the counter top as Harper rubbed her back.

"Below that…." Theresa further instructed.

"Ashley Tisdale as Hannah Dinkle."

"Yes!" Harper with a big grin cheered and pumped her fist in excitement. Alex looked back at her annoyed.

"Based on a screenplay and characters by William Russo." Jerry finally got to the part Theresa wanted him to read. "_William Russo_? Who the heck is William Russo?"

"Yes, Jerry…" Theresa snatched the synopsis back. "Who the heck is William Russo?"

"I don't know!" Jerry paced around a bit through the tables and chairs as he rubbed his head. "I never heard of a William Russo! I've never heard of the guy before."

"Dad…" Justin strolled over to his father. "Do we have any non…. Magic-inclined relatives?"

"Justin…." Jerry tugged the boy away from the customers sitting and eating in the booth. "Not all Russos are wizards, and if there were any Russos who weren't, they'd be bound by an oath not to reveal the family secret. Whoever this guy is…" He paused trying to think. "I've got nothing."

"Jerry, whoever William Russo is, he knows the family secret." Theresa hated magic, but she loved her family. "You've got to find out who he is and find out why he's writing stories about our kids!"

"Wait a minute!" Alex lifted her head. "Could William Russo be the creep with the laptop posting the fake pictures of Harper and me?"

Justin and her parents looked at her and realized there were bigger things at stake than her pride.

"Not Mikayla, please not Mikayla…" Alex started lowering her head again as Harper rubbed her back. "Anyone but Mikayla…."


	2. Chapter 2

2

Actress-slash-singer Mikayla was skiing in Aspen with comedienne Sonny Munroe from the syndicated sketch comedy series, "So Random," and actress-slash-model, Jerrica Adams, her blonde co-star from the "Haunted High School" movie series. The sky was a bluish gray and the powder was perfect at their Aspen lodge. The brunette beauty was skiing down hill at accelerated speed when she dodged to miss a tree stump if but to see it pop up by magic right in front of her and send her spilling over an embankment. The fall had knocked the wind out of her, but it also broke her leg. She thought she'd be okay to play Ashley Russell when "_Bride Of Darkness_," now renamed "_Night of Black Shadows_," started filming at the Old Bartilson House on New York's Staten Island. If not, Vanessa Hudgins was available. Just when the pop star known for her tirades against Hannah Montana thought she was getting better, her car exploded and her face was lightly singed. She then came down with a mysterious toothache that had her in constant pain for three days. Her boyfriend also left her for a mystery blonde, and then the necklace her grandmother gave her mysteriously vanished. It was as if someone had placed a curse on her life.

"Alex…" Harper read in the gossip magazine about how Mikayla was fighting laryngitis. "You think you want to let up on the curse you put on Mikayla?"

"There's no way in hell I'm letting her play me in a movie!" Alex hissed. "If it comes down to it, I'll play me!"

"But you can't act…" Harper reminded her. "Remember Justin's play?"

"I'd be playing me, that's not acting." Alex shot back and turned toward her mother at the kitchen counter of their upstairs loft apartment. Her mother checked the roast in the oven and looked around toward her daughter and Harper coming closer to her.

"Where's dad?"

"He finally got an address on William Russo." Theresa stood almost posed at the stovetop. "Your father and Justin used a spell to go check him out in Boston. We'll have dinner when they get back."

"Any news if those movie people chose our shop to film in?" Alex took a sprig of cooked broccoli to snack on.

"Not yet…" Theresa was still grinning about having a film crew in their sandwich shop. "It all depends if your father low-balled the price for them."

"How much is he asking?"

"Five million dollars."

"I don't think we're getting it." Alex decided to face the truth. Orion Studios was debating on almost thirty local shops to pose as the fictional Mystical Burgers and Sodas place in the movie, and among them, the producers liked about half of them, including their shop. At five million, the studio could build an interior or rent an empty restaurant. Theresa wanted him to just leave the money option open and take what they offered, but Jerry thought he knew what he was doing.

"I've been thinking about this whole William Russo thing." Harper sat on the outside edge of the sofa. "Alex, what if he's like your long lost brother?"

"Great…" Alex groaned. "Another person to compete with to become the family wizard."

"I don't think so, Harper…" Theresa whipped the mashed potatoes with creamed butter and set them down covered by the lid. "When I married Jerry, he told me he had never been married and didn't have any kids. If he had any kids out of wedlock, I'm sure he would know."

"But how could he know, Mrs. Russo?" Harper had a greater grasp of the world than even Alex. "How could he possibly know?"

Theresa and Alex looked at each other briefly.

"No more wizards in the family… No more wizards in the family…." They began praying and chanting in unison.

Several hours away in Boston, or a few minutes by those who knew the fine arts of magic, Jerry and Justin were counting house numbers along Baum Street on the south side of Boston. It was a nice neighborhood with large oak and maple trees, picket fences and rows of Victorian and New England homes. According to the secret enchanted websites Jerry knew on the Internet for locating random persons, William Russo called the large Colonial with the extended porch at 1363 Baum Street his home. It was a large two-story white edifice with an apple tree hanging over the fence at the corner and a large oak rising high above the pitched roof with a garret window over the interior foyer. Justin had never been in suburbia before, and his father hadn't been out of Manhattan in over twenty years. They glanced at the porch swing to one end of the porch and then over to the basket of apples under the window. They looked at each other trying to decide what to do next.

"Justin, " Jerry rubbed his chest worriedly. "I'm not sure what we're getting into, but follow my lead and if he pulls out a wand, run for it." He pressed the doorbell and a chord of bells ran inside the prim and proper residence. Justin looked around worriedly. His father mulled about not as prepared as he once was. Justin listened to the doorbell. He recognized it.

"Tchaikovsky's Third Symphony… they've got good taste." He heard footsteps inside the door and the dark image of a presence through the curtain on the other side of the door. It couldn't be William Russo. It was a woman with long cascading dark hair passing over her dark blue sweater. She was a shapely beauty in that awkward range of age, obviously old enough to be a mother but attractive enough to hide her age. She clicked the lock over and parted the doors, her eyes looking up to Jerry's face and then Justin. A slight gasp as if she knew them from somewhere and she reassured herself and her composure.

"Yes?" Her eyes nervously responded. "Can I help you?"

"Yes…" Jerry recognized her reaction. "I'm Jerry… Smith." He paused briefly before lying for his own reasons. "This is my son, Justin… Smith… and we're… uh, here to get an interview. Yes, my son is writing an article for his school paper, and he'd like to do an interview with William Russo."

Justin chuckled a bit, reached behind his back and conjured a pencil and notepad from behind his back. The woman at the door looked to Justin, her mind readily suspecting something else then looked back to Jerry.

"Do you have an appointment?" She asked.

"Uh, well, we…."

"Mom…." Someone sounded off and Justin looked inside the foyer. Tall and garbed in a white shirt with blue jeans, William Russo stood trying to pull back his over-protective mother. He wore glasses and seemed just a little bit older than himself. He strolled forward as his mother stepped aside in the small space between the front door and a small table. "I'm William Russo." He genially shook Jerry's hand then Justin's. "I guess I could do one more interview for a high school kid."

"Thank you very much."

"I don't want you doing this one." Miranda Russo turned her head to her twenty-two year old son.

"Why not?" William was far too trusting and open. "Come on in, my mother's just a bit protective, and I'm not doing anything right now anyway." He opened the screen door for Jerry and Justin to enter; William's mother the whole time looking at them upset and discourteously. Her narrowed eyes peered toward Jerry staring at her. She obviously knew him, and she looked somehow familiar to him as well from somewhere. She stepped backward into her parlor as her son guided Justin to a chair in his study on the opposite side of the house. It was a pine green room filled with books and bookcases. One end of the room ended with double doors into the dining room. An antique globe adorned the center of the room marked with ferns on upright extended pots. The writer William Russo took his seat at a large Elizabethan desk the size of a small car. Before him on one side was his personal computer and two stacks of notebooks and bulging files in front of him on the desk with scattered notes on index cards and slips of paper. He carefully stacked them out of the way as Justin sat down. Across the foyer, William's mother stood at the base of the regal staircase staring at Jerry, her gaze softening a bit as she turned her eyes to Justin. Begrudgingly, she stepped back and turned away to her chicken roasting in the kitchen.

"Since I sold my screenplay," William spoke up animatedly. "I've been doing all sorts of interviews about my movie. My mom is so proud of me she came up from Salem to take care of my house so I could focus on the script." He leaned back in his chair with a humble grin on his face.

"Your father must also be proud of you." Jerry commented as Justin prepared to do an interview.

"I never really knew him." William sighed a bit. "He died before I was born."

"Oh…" Justin started thinking up questions. Looking around, Jerry scanned the books on the shelf by the door. On one side were New Age books on the occult and the paranormal, but closer to him were books about magic and sorcery. He recognized a few of the titles. "_Secrets of The Ancients_" had been required reading when he was at WizTech, and possibly still was. "_A History of the Salem Witch Trials_" was another book every wizard knew about, but "_The Annals of Magic_" had been out of print since 1795 and was a very hard tome to find even for those in the magic community.

"So…" Justin continued. "Where did you get the idea for Jason and Ashley Russell?" He sat ready to write the interview.

"They've been floating through my head since I've been ten… maybe eight years old." William confessed. "They've haunted my dreams, invaded my thoughts…. They've been a part of my life for as long as I could remember." He paused nostalgically. "Since I was thirteen, I've written almost two hundred short stories about them perfecting their personalities and past and their magic powers."

"What kind of stories?"

"All sorts of crazy and stupid stuff…." William thought back. "I had Ashley swimming in a chocolate river, Jason dated a female centaur once and then a female werewolf, Ashley enchanted a baseball game to impress a boy, once became possessed by a ghost…"

"This sounds awfully familiar." Jerry whispered to Justin who realized the tales were all from their past.

"At one time," William continued. "Maxine was supposed to be a little boy, but it just seemed more funnier to write him as a girl, and I once I briefly called the characters Justin and Alex because I liked those names better, but my mother freaked out and I had to change them again. "

"Your mother freaked out when you used those names…." Jerry and Justin shared knowing gazes then looked back to William. "Did she give a reason?"

"She didn't tell me," William fussed with the scattered cards under his computer monitor. "But I have the feeling they were names of some people she used to know."

"How'd they get to be movie characters?" Justin asked.

"I wanted to publish the stories together in one big book, but the publisher said the work was too close to the work of H. J. Darling…" William added.

Justin reacted secretly knowing the identity of that person.

"Next thing I know, Monica Gomez at Orion Pictures was calling and asking for the rights to the characters for a movie so I created a story merging plot lines from movies I knew," William continued. "Like "The Shining," "Night of the Demons" and "Legend of Hell House."

"So, the movie isn't part of your original continuity." Justin wanted to be sure the movie wasn't a prophecy.

"No, it's a completely separate creation." William heard his cell phone vibrating on his desk. Looking around, he found it concealed by his notebook.

"Dad," Justin whispered to his father. "He has no idea where he's getting these stories!"

"No," Jerry agreed and whispered back after looking over the books on the walls. "But I think his mother does!"

"Excuse me…." William checked the number on his cell phone, clicked it and held it to his ear. "Hey, Sam, what's up." The voice of Sam Raimi, the director for "_Bride of Darkness_," came through the phone. He sounded upset and exacerbated. "What happened to Mikayla this time? What? The plague?" He paused as Justin and his father looked at each other. "Sam, no one gets the plague anymore in this day and age!"

"Alex!" Jerry and Justin realized who could whip up a break out break with little effort.

"Is she going to be okay?" William sounded concerned. He liked the cute young pop star when she wasn't bashing Hannah Montana or in the tabloids for wrecking cars and trashing hotel rooms with wild parties. Despite her public persona, she was exactly what he pictured for Ashley Russell in his movie. "Sam, I really wanted her for…. Vanessa Hudgins doesn't do horror movies? How about Tisdale? We'll just recast Hannah Dinkle. She also got the plague?"

"She must have used the heavy duty curse." Jerry whispered to Justin.

"Justin, I'm sorry." William clicked off his phone. "I've got to get to New York. I'm also the creative consultant for the movie, and Sam wants me to help screen potential replacements for Mikayla." He rose from his seat and paused in disbelief. "The plague? Nobody gets the plague in this day and age…" He mumbled to himself.

"That's okay…" Justin beamed securely and took to his feet with his note pad under his arm. "I think I found everything wanted to know for this trip." He and his father looked at each other. William headed toward the foyer and found his mother on the bottom steps of the staircase and against the wall where she had been eavesdropping.

"Mom, Sam wants me back in Manhattan." William started trudging loudly up the stairs. "Can you watch the house till I get back?"

"Of course, baby…. I'll even make you some sandwiches for your flight." Miranda Russo beamed lovingly to her son and stroked his back as he hiked up the staircase and vanished into his room at the top, but her eyes narrowed and her head turned slowly annoyed back toward Jerry and Justin in her son's house. "You two can go now."

"Sure," Jerry agreed and looked knowingly to his son then back to William's mother on the third step. "You know, we used to know a nice family named Russo. Nice couple, three kids… They live in Manhattan. Relatives?"

"Please, get out."

"I remember them, dad." Justin played along and moved over to the wood and glass case against the wall from the stairs. "Oh, on Waverly Place, wasn't it? I mean, the daughter was ill tempered, but the son... Everyone liked him. "

"Mr. Russo, would you and your son please go now?"

"Okay, I'm going, but…" Jerry did a double take. "Wait, you knew my real name!" Jerry looked to Justin and back to William's mother. "Who are you?"

"Dad!" Justin had casually glanced into the glass case of collector plates and crystal sculptures. In a gold frame, Justin picked up a photo he had seen years ago, but what was it doing here and now? Back then, he was dating a Goth girl at Tribeca Prep named Miranda DeLuise and had given her an inexpensive necklace from the drugstore. The same necklace was now draped around the neck of William's mother. In the photo was Miranda Russo as a young girl in high school and behind her… Justin saw himself and Alex!

"Miranda!" He recognized William's mother as that girl. She was older and taller. The face was the same, but fuller and older. She was practically timeless, a beautiful woman who had concealed her true age… or had used sorcery to travel back in time from the future. The last time he had seen her, her family was moving to Salem, Massachusetts and he had promised to never forget her, but he had… in a way.

"The Goth Girl?" Jerry recalled her face.

"Get out!" She yelled at them than face them.

"Miranda," Justin was still in shock. "You're old?" He than thought about William. "Is William my son?"

"I said get out!" Miranda lifted a ball of crackling energy and hurled at their feet. The front entryway threw itself open, and the mystical forces lifted both Jerry and Justin together, hurling them over each other, through the door, above the porch and tumbling head over feet into the front yard. Behind them, the door slammed shut against them. Jerry had the breath knocked out of him, but Justin landed on his arm, spraining his wrist, which he pulled up under his chest.

"Dad…" He crawled over to his father as his pad of paper flew around like leaves descending to earth. "It's Miranda! I dated her. She must have come from the future like Alex did a year ago." He gasped a moment. "She's a wizard like us!"

"No, Justin, not a wizard…" Jerry was slowly catching his breath. "She's a witch."


	3. Chapter 3

3

There was an empty Gothic Victorian for sale down on Baum Street near Beacon Hill. Jerry and Justin wandered in after seeing the open house sign, and in the privacy of the empty kitchen away from prying eyes, Justin did the transportation spell that hopped them from Boston to New York City, specifically the living room of their loft apartment on the Lower East Side. Their sudden appearance along with the burst of light and smoky mystical energy had surprised Harper who shrieked lightly at the sight of them. Theresa was setting the dinner table when they had appeared. Upon arrival, Jerry and Justin overwhelming began talking and describing everything they had discovered. Theresa tried hearing both their statements on top of each other, but they were both excited and talking too much. On the sofa, Alex and Harper looked confused. Max froze holding a can of soda to his lips.

"Hold it!" Theresa stopped their over laden and overwrought meandering into her face. "I did not understand one thing you guys yelled in my face."

"Mom," Justin spoke first. "Do you remember Miranda, the girl I dated?"

"The Goth Girl?" Alex recalled her with a snide tone to her voice.

"She wasn't a Goth girl." Justin corrected her. "She just dressed differently."

"Yeah, Goth!" Alex reiterated. Harper just smirked nearly laughing as she checked her e-mail on her laptop.

"Never mind that…" Jerry headed over to Max and pulled a bottle of water from the refrigerator, twisting its top off and drinking from it. "Theresa, William Russo is Justin's son… from the future… I think."

"What?"

"Wait a minute…" Max was incredulous. "Justin once dated a Goth girl?"

Jerry lightly popped Max upside the back of his head to reboot it.

"Oh, the Goth girl!" He remembered Miranda. "She was after Centaur Girl but before Wolf-Girl."

"She wasn't a Goth girl." Justin repeated himself. "She just dressed in black with a lot of jewelry."

"Yeah, Goth!" Alex laughed.

"Not only that, but she's also a witch!" Jerry continued sipping his bottled water behind the kitchen counter. Theresa's eyes widened upon hearing that. Even Alex's jaw dropped upon hearing that. Her father took a moment to catch his breath. "What I can't figure out is if she was always a witch and whether or not she told William about us. I mean, he has no idea we're real; he thinks we're all just images in his head. He knows all about us."

"Jerry," Theresa knew Miranda and her parents from the Tribeca PTA. "I know Miranda's parents; their daughter is not a witch. The last news I had on her was that was attending Dorothy Gale High School in Salem, Massachusetts and definitely not pregnant with any of our future grandchildren!" She paused with the thought of tiny babies running under her feet again. "Grandchildren…." She mused happily on the thought.

"Mr. Russo…" Harper spoke up. "Aren't witches evil?"

"No…" Jerry took another sip from his bottle of water. "They have the same mystic powers as wizards and are generally harmless, usually just making potions and good look charms, but as far as magic, they're bound by the rule of three-times-three. Any spells they cast will come back on them three times. In fact, there are no such things as evil witches… except for Satanists and devil-worshippers."

"Like Alex…" Justin commented. She shot a look at him.

"Jerry, what about the movie?" Theresa was still setting the table for dinner. "We can't have a movie bust the kids as wizards!"

"I don't know what to do."

"Dad…" Max was grinning ear to ear as he came over to his father. "You've got nothing to worry about. Alex put a curse on Mikayla…"

"Max!" Alex's voice rose and she hit her own head expecting to be punished.

"Oh, yeah, that was supposed to be a secret." Max once again had got lost in his head and lost the point.

"Yeah, well…" Jerry came up behind his daughter and leaned down to her. "Bad news, princess, but Miranda is deeply protective of William and the movie. She's not going to let a novice female wizard be casting curses on its actors."

"Daddy…" Alex looked up grinning like a little girl. "This is a really good curse. No one could take it off."

"Bad news, Alex…" Harper had closed her Yahoo account and was now reading from TeenBeat Dot Com. "But Mikayla was just released from Los Angeles Regional Hospital; they're calling her bout with bubonic plague a misdiagnosis." She looked over to Alex. "Turns out it was just an allergy to a new perfume."

"Crap and a half!"

"But the good news is that Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato are friends again!"

"There's no freaking way I'm letting someone who sounds like a truck backing up over a cat play me in a movie!" Alex jumped up and posed briefly halfway to the stairway. "Did Cupid Have A Heart? No, but Little Miss I-Hate-Hannah-Montana is getting my wand up her ass!" She turned and raced down to the lair accessed from the restaurant.

"Alex!" Theresa yelled at her daughter racing down the stairs. "Dinner is practically on the table!"

"Justin, stop her!" Jerry looked to his sons.

"Are you crazy?" Justin stood with his arms folded.

"We're lucky she's not putting a curse on us!" Max stood by Justin; the two of them did their secret handshake.

"Looks like it's the job of the sidekick once again." Harper knew where to find the hostile pampered princess. Jerry had stored everything from his mystical past in the attic and had sealed it up. The only access to it was through the mystical portal in the back of the freezer of the sandwich shop. The room was full of antique furniture, tomes and grimoires on magic, artifacts and sculptures of mystical beasts. The Russo Family Spell Book contained the family history and their list of arcane incantations. Alex flipped it over with a vengeance, skipping over the pages of her ancestry back to High Roman Kings and Celtic mages and going straight toward the lists of spells and hexes.

"Let's see here…" She scanned the page. "Bad Teeth… did that. Bubonic Plague… did that. Car trouble… did that. Cheating boyfriend… did that. Exploding diarrhea…" She looked up considering it. "Not good enough." She scrolled the page. "What? There's no spell for hairy moles or buck teeth? Oh, come on!"

"Okay, Alex…" Harper finally caught up with her. "We know how this works. I tell you to forget about it, you do it anyway, it all explodes in your face and then your realize I was right. Let's just skip to the end, all right?"

"Werewolf curse!" Alex lit up. "Perfect! She'll have so much hair on her she'll make Mason look like a Chihuahua!"

"Alex!" Harper looked at her in shock! "She could kill a lot of people!"

"Yeah…" Alex suddenly listened to her conscience. "I guess that's too vicious." She rescanned the page. "Bad Flight Curse! She has to fly to come to New York!"

"It could crash and kill all the other passengers." Harper replied. "Do you really want that sort of bad karma?"

"Okay… the Dwarf Curse!" Her eyes lit up sadistically. "That's perfect! By time I'm through with her, the only movie she'll be starring in is a remake of "The Wizard Of Oz!" Alex tore a picture of Mikayla from her closest Teen Scene magazine and headed to the table for the spell.

"I can't watch this!" Harper covered her eyes. Lighting a candle, Alex pulled her wand out and prepared to burn the pop star's image on the page. Somewhere else, another person was watching. A large fire ablaze in her son's fireplace, Miranda Russo was alone in her son's Boston home. Sitting on her legs before the mantle, eyes closed and rocking back and forth, she spoke the pagan words used by long forgotten priestesses from Ancient Greece.

"I call upon the watchtowers of the north…" She whispered from inside her trance. "Earth, air, fire, water… Lady Hecate, Mother Earth, protect this girl and everyone around her…" She clutched an image of Mikayla to her bosom. "By the power of three-times-three, make her see, make her see…."

"Faeries and sprites, trolls and dwarves…" On Waverly Place, Alex invoked similar mystical energies in the universe.

"Alex, " Her father came up behind her tiredly. "For the love of God, please tell me you didn't cast the Chronic Coughing spell."

"Mikayla shrinkus dinkus awards…" She burned the picture then looked to her father. "There's a Chronic Coughing Spell?" As the magazine clipping of Mikayla went up in smoke, it suddenly exploded and filled the entire room with thick gray smoke. Jerry was thrown backward into Harper as everything went black. Somewhere, Miranda Russo grinned happily and thanked her gods and protective spirits for the protection spell over the pop star, but the explosion on Waverly Place was so loud that the Italians running the delicatessen across the street checked their stoves. Car alarms up and down the block were going off. The window in the bookstore next door cracked. As the reverberations abated, every dog and stray on the block started sounding off. Rats and a solitary alligator in the sewer started racing from the source of the blast. Neighbors started calling the police as Justin lead his mother and Max down into the shop. The smoke was a bit wispy in the shop, but visibility in the kitchen was negligible. Through it, Theresa could see two shapes. Jerry was carrying Harper under his arm. The two of them were choking and coughing their lungs up.

"Oh no!" Theresa helped Jerry to a chair, and Justin held on to Harper clinging to him. "It's the Chronic Coughing Spell!" Jerry was clutching his chest in pain. Harper was crying and squeezing Justin for solace.

"No, the Chronic Coughing Spell is actually much worse than this." Jerry's raspy voice choked as he took a cup of water from the down stairs soda fountain. His lungs were on fire, his chest pounding with pain. Harper was choking and shaking as Justin gave her water. "Harper, what spell did Alex do?"

"Well…" She heard a tiny coughing chirp like a crying baby behind her then looked down beyond the counter. Coming up behind Max was a tiny eight-inch high figure like a brunette Barbie doll clutching a shred of ripped violet fabric around her naked body. Its tiny coughing sound resembled the call of a small bird. Waving her left arm and stumbling around a bit, Alex reached the thinnest perimeter of the smoke and looked up and up and up again. The table was the size of an aircraft hangar and the chairs resembled large huts. Sitting on those huts, her family towered almost fifty feet over her.

"How did you guys get so big?" Her tiny voice squeaked.


	4. Chapter 4

4

The Dolphin Hotel loomed over Central Park near the theatre district from 2245 Lexington Street. Built between 1910 and 1912, it was twenty-five stories tall with three hundred and fifty rooms and fifty-two suites. It personified the best of the most elegant hotels on Manhattan from its palatial lobby to its aristocratic staff. Celebrities from Tom Cruise to W.C. Fields had once stayed here. Five American Presidents had been guests in the hotel. Al Capone reportedly met in secret meetings in the Coral Lounge during Prohibition. Bellhops in traditional uniforms moved luggage for foreign dignitaries and ambassadors from other countries under the high vaulted ceiling as guests came and entered from gold plated elevators. Afghan hounds belonging to one guest strutted like monarchy over the parquet floors as the bustling lobby moved with the activities of people from every walk of like. Celebrities hobnobbed with politicians, captains of industry, leaders of other countries and businessmen of powerful Fortune500 companies. Only the Manhattan Tipton Hotel dared to match them in elegance. In the Eighteenth Floor North Suite, the former Michelle Danielle Roarke, a young teen from Lafayette, Texas known to her fans as Mikayla, relaxed from her flight with a long hot shower in her luxury bathroom. The shower stall was tiled in aqua blue titles and highlighted with silver fixtures. The towels were embroidered with silver letters. Her manager, Margo Freshwater, paced in the living area talking to clients through a phone accessory on her ear. Through her other ear, she heard the water shut off and turned toward the door to the bedroom as Mikayla extended her leg out of the shower on to the white shag bathroom rug and reached with her right arm for the towel.

"Look…" The voice of the tall Junoesque woman argued with unseen people. "If Conan wants Mikayla on his talk show, she's got to be his first guest! She's a lot more than just a musical talent; she's a very talented comedienne! Did you not see her star on "_So Random_" and host "_Saturday Night Live_?" She paused as Mikayla came strolling out in the flannel hotel robe to snack from the food cart brought to the room. "What? No she did not start that fight on "_Shake It Up_," that skinny brunette pushed her first!"

The brunette cutie looked up munching on strawberries and sipping banana and pineapple juice.

"Oh, yeah," Margo shook her finger to her reflection in the glass of the window. "Well, Conan must not want her that much if you can't bump Jessica Alba to accommodate someone who can act and sing! What? Sure, you can re-schedule her! She's going to be in Manhattan filming another movie for at least a month! You know where to find me!" She turned off her earpiece, gasped to catch her breath and turned toward the cart for the pig-in-blanket snacks.

"Margo…" Mikayla unpeeled a banana to eat. "Please be nice. "

"Nice doesn't cut it, sweetie…" Margo popped another blanketed weenie in her mouth. "You've got make them think you mean business otherwise people will walk all over you."

"Yeah…" Mikayla sipped bottled juice between bites of her banana.

"Didn't I help you get back on the Top Forty list?" Margo popped open a Diet Pepsi between dipping into the bowl of cashews. "You have not had a Top Ten since "_If Cupid Had A Heart_," and after Britney re-released Michael Jackson's "_Thriller_," wasn't I right when I said if you re-released "_Larger Than Life_" by the Backstreet Boys that you'd top one million albums again."

"Yeah…" Mikayla sighed as Margo dropped into the chair in the room. "But it only got as high as twelve before it dropped off the charts." She sipped her juice and turned to the window. "Maybe I ought to quit singing and just focus on acting. I mean… I was that close to getting to play the daughter on "_No Ordinary Family_."

"And wasn't I right that it'd only last one season." Margo sipped her soda and looked back and again at Mikayla at the window. "And get away from that window! We don't need the paparazzi catching another wardrobe malfunction!"

Mikayla looked down and adjusted her robe, tying it securely around her waist and burying her figure deep inside it. She stepped back from the window while tipping back her bottle. Her manager was now eating more of the sausages, even dipping them into the ranch dressing.

"Margo, you really need to start eating healthier." She spoke up. "All that fat you're eating is bad for you."

"You're the one on the health kick, pudding, not me." Margo checked her messages on her cell phone then reached down to the table and picked up the script for the movie Mikayla was doing. "Here, start memorizing your lines!"

"What are they calling it now?"

"_The Wizards of Lexington Avenue_…" Margo revealed the blue cover. "Personally, I liked the original title." She paused sipping her soda again. "Why are you doing another horror movie? I mean, I read it. This movie is twisted!"

"I know! That's why I like it!" Mikayla lit up. "Ashley Russell is so cool! She lives above a hamburger joint, she's constantly insulting her preppie brother, she practices magic, and after she makes the pact with the devil, she crawls up walls and ceilings and sucks guys into her body! This is a hundred times scarier than anything I did in "_Haunted High School_!"

"I don't know, sweetie." Margo rose to her feet. "Since you signed the contract, you've been through a lot of bad luck. You fractured your leg skiing, you had to have emergency dental surgery, your car blew up, David broke up with you and then the doctors had you in quarantine for suspected Bubonic Plague. I mean, who gets the plague in this day and age?"

"And I survived it all." Mikayla grinned like a little girl. "Margo, I am doing this role, and by hell or high water, no one is taking away from me. Not Vanessa Hudgins, not Tawni Hart, and definitely not Hannah Montana!" She sipped the last of her juice and tossed the bottle in the wastebasket near the television. "What's keeping Hillary, I need my shiatsu!"

"I'll call her." Margo prepped herself a second and checked the numbers on her phone. "I'm going over to talk to Letterman's people about your interview tomorrow night. Just study your script and… Here - " She handed the girl a crucifix. "Use this to ward off any evil spirits."

"Thanks, Margo…." Mikayla took it to humor her. Grabbing a few more cashews, Margo turned toward the double doors of the suite and headed out through the left side of the door, revealing the long elegant hallway to the silver doors of the elevators. The far doors opened up as the elevator reached the Eighteenth floor and revealed Alex Russo back to normal size and Harper Finkle dressed in black and white uniforms as hotel maids. They looked checking the floor out for the hotel detective looking for them. Margo was coming straight toward them. Heading straight toward her, Harper dusted the wall with the feather duster in her hand to keep up her disguise. Alex continued walking as Margo talked through her earpiece.

"Hillary, where are you?" She had got the voice mail for Mikayla's masseuse. "Hillary, answer your phone! If you're not here within ten minutes giving Mikayla her massage, you are so fired!"

Alex and Harper looked at each other nervously as they started getting closer.

"If you need something done, you've got to do it yourself…" She checked her phone, noticed Alex and turned to face her. "Mikayla, Hillary is acting non compus delecti, but I promise you, if she's not here within ten minutes… Why are you dressed as a French housekeeper?" She looked Alex over a bit confused. Alex reacted surprised and incensed as well.

"Never mind!" She looked away. "I don't need to know!" She turned back to the elevators mumbling to herself. In the elevator, she pressed the button for the mezzanine and looked up to the lights for the floors. In the hall, Harper reacted stunned. She thought they were busted. Alex looked back the way Mikayla's manager had gone.

"She thought you was Mikayla!" Harper grinned almost laughing.

"What?"

"Not that you look like her…"

"You got that right!" Alex continued for the suite.

"Now, Alex…" Harper gasped a bit. "Here's what I don't get, you've got this necklace that will cause bad luck, but how will you get Mikayla to wear it if Miranda has a protective spell around her?"

"I may not be able to affect Mikayla directly…" Alex came up on the doors to the suite, one of which was ajar. "But this will jinx everyone around her. No one will ever want to do another movie with her by time I'm through with her."

"Wow…" Harper watched as Alex knocked at the door. "I'm just glad I'm your best friend!"

"Hillary, is that you?" Mikayla's voice called out. She finished her banana and tossed the peel into the trash. "I got your table all set up in here. I got to tell you, staying in the hospital I think really screwed up my back." She slid down her robe past her shoulders and climbed up on the table, laying down on her chest with her head in the opening. "I have not been able to get a decent night's sleep since!"

Alex and Harper wandered in slowly into the suite. They noticed the food cart first with fruits, nuts and cocktail weenies and the chilled drinks underneath and then gazed around the room from the forty-inch flat screen, the period furniture, the honor bar built into the wall and then the large shiatsu table laid out in front of the armoire. Stretched out on it was the five-foot-six and hundred and twenty pound form of a pop star icon who once accused Hannah Montana of stuffing her bra. She was also known for sometimes ignoring fans at the airport and reportedly stealing golf-carts with Sonny Munroe from the set of "_MacKenzie Falls_." She was America's most lovable bad girl.

"So, have you heard any new tabloid rumors?" Mikayla hadn't seen them yet and spoke through the headrest. "What have you heard about Taylor Lautner lately? Does he still want to meet me?"

Harper and Alex were pushing and cajoling each other in silence. Mikayla was expecting a massage and if she didn't get it, she'd look up and know who they were. Harper pushed Alex to do it, but the brunette sorceress just backed off from the pop star. Mikayla was her kryptonite. Touching her would have her throwing up.

"Hillary, what's going…." Mikayla started getting up and Harper pushed her head back down.

"Don't get up…" Harper started doing a fake Jersey accent. "That's very bad for your back." She reached down and started rubbing Mikayla's white skin and massaging it the way she had seen real masseuses do it.

"It is?" Mikayla's eyes looked under her a bit confused. Hillary sounded weird to her; where was that light Asian voice she knew so well? "What's wrong with your voice?"

"Not a thing…" Harper looked to Alex ready to put the necklace with the jinxed talisman on the pop star. "So, sweetie, how's your life been lately?"

"Have you seen the tabloids?" Mikayla cried out as she felt fingers massaging her back. "Just one weird incident after another. I mean… I invite Jerrica and Sonny with me to Aspen and this tree stump comes right up out of the ground. I mean, out of the ground! How does that happen?"

"I don't know…." Harper responded looking at Alex trying to get the necklace around Mikayla's neck. "A trick of the light, perhaps?"

"I don't think so." Mikayla continued. "Not only that, but the engine in my convertible Volkswagen bug exploded. I loved that car! I'm just driving along, stop at a light and it suddenly explodes and launches itself into the sky. They never did find it! The shop said it'd be easier to replace the entire car that the engine." She sounded upset. "I loved that car so much!"

"Yeah…." Harper looked at Alex. She almost had the necklace on Mikayla.

"And besides David breaking up with me and getting my back wisdom teeth pulled," Mikayla went on about her life. "That girl I told you about, Alex Russo… She's still bad mouthing me on my own fan site message boards!"

Alex and Harper looked at each other.

"Why does this girl hate me so much?" Mikayla opined. "I mean… what did I ever do to her? Well, yeah, I tracked her down last summer and punched her in the jaw…."

Alex looked up from recalling that and moved the bottom part of her mouth a bit reflecting on the pain.

"But… I mean, before that…" Mikayla continued her gripes. "Have you read some of the things that girl has said about me? She's criticized everything about me from my voice, my hair, my clothes, my body, my singing, my acting…." She paused. "Why does this girl hate me so much?"

"I don't know…" Harper answered. On the table near the snack cart, Mikayla's cell phone played a few chords of "If Cupid Had A Heart." The pop star tilted her head toward it upon hearing it.

"Would you hand my phone to me?" Her hand reached up blindly. "That's got to be Aly Michalka about an exercise video she's creating. I told her I'd do music on it." Alex rushed over and handed it to Mikayla. If the pop star hadn't had so much hair, she would have had the necklace on her and gotten out of the suite. Upon getting her phone, Mikayla popped it open with one hand and held it to her ear above the table.

"Hey, Aly," Mikayla responded sweetly. "How's the… Hillary?" She recognized her masseuse's delicate Asian voice through the phone.

Alex and Harper looked at each other.

"What do you mean you're stuck on Lexington near Waverly Place?" The singer reacted. "Who's been rubbing my back for…." She jerked her head up. "YOU!" She recognized Alex and jerked her robe up.

"Crap-and-a-half!" Alex hurled the necklace at Harper as Mikayla launched off the table after her. She raced for the exit then felt her hair being pulled out by the roots. Harper hid in the corner watching as the two brunettes dueled it out between themselves. Mikayla had Alex screaming by the hair, pulling her back as Alex tried reaching for the lamp to her right then taking the metal platter from the snack cart, dumping the melon balls off it and flattening it over the pop star's head. Mikayla went down as Alex started reaching for her wand in her boot, but Mikayla got to her feet first and jumped forward reaching for Alex's arm extended with the wand, flipping her over her shoulder to the floor then bending her right arm to use her elbow on her. Harper watched Alex's wand skidding toward her across the light blue carpet and landing under the massage table. Choking and fighting back, Alex started climbing over the sofa, Mikayla's arms in a chokehold around her neck.

"Alex, what should I do?" Harper couldn't watch this fight. Alex was pointing at something. "What?" She looked around. "Your wand? The book? The lamp?" She looked around uselessly. "Alex, I'm not really good at this game!"

"Platter…" Alex choked slowly blacking out. Harper raced and grabbed the platter off the floor, but Mikayla saw it coming and dropped Alex with Harper accidentally hitting Alex with it instead. Her teeth gritted together apologetically, she cursed at her own slow reflexes and looked at Mikayla taking a karate stance. She had learned the martial arts for her science fiction movie with Jake Ryan. She kicked Harper once to the chest, spun around and knocked her in the jaw next, taking her out next.

Falling over the sofa in the center of the room, Alex sat a second on the floor looking for her wand, her head spinning and her chest pounding for air. Where did the platter go? Where was it?

"Voice like a screeching cat?" Mikayla came around looking for Alex crawling around on the floor. "Hygiene like the Bride of Frankenstein?" The pop star just pictured herself beating up Hannah Montana. "I hope you can fly, Russo, because you're going by the window!"

"Stop! Please stop!" Clutching the necklace from the floor, Alex was backed to the corner near the hydrangea in the room. "Look…" She coughed a bit. "I didn't come here to fight. I just wanted to bring you… a peace offering."

"I'm not buying it!"

"Look, here!" Alex dangled and shook the necklace. "Please…" Mikayla snatched the jewelry and looked at it suspiciously.

"I know I have a big mouth…" Alex trembled as Harper found her wand, but without her magic, she also had a devious mind. "But I just wanted to… apologize. I'm sorry for all the things I said about you, I wanted to give you the necklace as a way of saying I'm sorry. I heard you lost one from your grandmother and felt sorry for you…"

"I'm not buying it, Russo…" Mikayla adjusted her robe over her body and scowled, shaking her head in defiance and folding her arms before her chest. "I know your type! You don't do anything for anyone unless you're getting something out of it."

"Boy, you sure figured Alex out!" Harper responded on the observation. Both Mikayla and Alex looked at her then back to each other.

"You're right." Alex sounded as if she was confessing. "You see… my brother, Justin, is seeing this girl named Juliet, and he got that necklace for her."

"Juliet's back?" Harper reacted confused.

"Yes, she's back…." Alex told Harper and looked back to Mikayla. "In order to screw my brother over, I thought I'd give you the necklace. I mean… he can always get her another crappy piece of jewelry."

"I don't know…." Mikayla had a good reason not to trust this girl. The necklace was an old ugly piece of debris. It was possibly real gold-plated jewelry, but it was tarnished and aged and the talisman didn't look like much of anything. It looked like it was possibly a griffin clutching a garnet in its chest. "It might go with the character I'm playing in my new movie…."

"So you'll wear it?"

"You really want me to wear this, Russo?" Mikayla looked to Alex and back to the necklace. "Tell you what, you write a five thousand word essay praising me and telling the world you were wrong about me and post it in my message boards, and I'll wear it. Heck, I might even let you have a bit part in my new movie."

Alex and Harper looked at each other.

"Done!" The two bitterly feuding brunettes shook hands.

"Fine, now get out before I call security…" Mikayla looked at the necklace closer. Alex and Harper turned limping and swaying from the fight for the doors. "Oh, and another thing…" Mikayla stopped Harper. "Nice fingers…"

"Thanks!" Harper lit up smiling. "She likes my fingers."

Alex rolled her eyes, limped on her left leg and held the left door open for Harper. Listening to the door click behind her, Mikayla lightly swayed dizzily and flared her eyes from her throbbing head. There were melon balls across the floor, a silver platter stuck inside the disheveled sofa and the coffee table was knocked over. It was still pretty clean compared to her past hotel rooms. She held the necklace up looking at it.

"There is no way in hell I'm wearing this ugly thing." She chucked it into the pot of the hydrangea.

"Alex," In the hall, Harper and Alex limped down the hall in their torn and unkempt stolen maid outfits for the elevators. "Are you really going to write an essay about Mikayla."

"Hell, no, you're going to write it." Alex pushed the button for the second floor and took her wand from Harper to change their clothes back. "Now, don't forget… it has to be five thousand words!"


	5. Chapter 5

5

On Saturdays, Theresa did the laundry in the house she didn't get done during the week. Emptying the hamper in the kid's bathroom, she looked at Max's underwear and realized he needed new shorts because the elastic band was coming off the fabric. In the basement, she separated the whites and the darks and ran them together in tandem with two washing machines, cutting her laundry time in half. Upstairs, she heard the telephone ringing.

"Can someone get that?" She called up. When she had passed through the loft, Alex was on the sofa watching television and Max was doing his homework from school at the table. After turning on the machine for the white laundry, she heard the phone ring again.

"Is someone getting that?" Theresa rushed up the stairs for the loft, hitting her head en route on the low pipe over the staircase. The phone rang a third time as she reached the top step, rushed off the top landing past Max on the table and grabbed the phone on the bookcase.

"Hello?"

"Mom, the phone's ringing…" Alex ate popcorn and watched "So Random" on TV.

"Thanks, Alex…" Theresa pretended to knock the bowl of popcorn from her lazy daughter's hand. "Yes, yes, it is…" She spoke to someone on the phone. "Yes, oh, okay… No, I truly understand. Thank you very much." She hung up the phone. "Kids…." She sounded tiredly disappointed not just from her run up the stairs but also from the bad news. "That was from Miss Prepone. It seems the studio went with the location of the Old Hamburger Hut over on Decatur. Max, you can tell your father to stop thumbing through those magazines of used yachts."

"We didn't get it?" Alex looked up depressed.

"Not when your father overbids the competition…" Theresa pulled her hair back sadly from her face. "Alex, he asked for three times more than anyone else!" She turned and wandered defeatedly to the chair to sit down, dropping her head backward in depression. "I knew I should have done it myself."

"Mom…." Justin came running up from the shop. "I was just talking to dad. I was thinking about going to Boston and talking to Old Miranda. Maybe she can convince William to change the names of the characters in the movie or something."

"Justin, that's a good idea." Theresa had a bit of good news. "That way, if the movie gets made, there's less of a chance of the characters being linked to you kids!"

"Yes…" Justin turned to his brother. "Max, you want to come with me to Boston?"

"I don't know, Justin…" Max thought over. "I mean, visiting a witch is cool, but I recall a documentary from a while back where one snatched two kids and tried to bake them in a stove."

"Max…" Justin thought back and put his fingers to his head. "That wasn't a documentary, it was a _Hansel and Gretel_ cartoon!"

"Oh…" Max sat and realized the truth. "How about we go visit the next witch that comes along?"

"Whatever…"

"I'll go…." Alex hopped up off the sofa from the TV. "Harper's busy writing a five thousand word essay and I've got nothing else to do." She ambled still tiredly sore from her ruckus with Mikayla as Justin pulled his wand out and whirled it up before his face. His mother watched from the living room area.

"Transportus Immortus, William Russo's Boston home…" Justin had been taught three transportation spells from his father, but he had learned five more when he was a brief applicant to Hogwarts School of Magic in Scotland. Their finer more exact spells were cleaner than the smoke inducing spells of the Russo family legacy. Before his mother, he just seemed to wink out with his sister, but to their eyes, reality twisted into a mishmash of colors then untwisted into the foyer of the house his father had himself had been thrown out of several days before. Casting a lock of her hair out of her face between her fingers, Alex lifted her head around looking around from in front of the display case and around the banister to the second floor. In addition to the photo of Miranda from three years prior, there were several awards and certificates for William to suggest he had grown up alongside them in the modern age than twenty years into the future. Alex noticed a "Best Gifted Writer Award" from 1998, and a Second Place writing trophy from H.G. Wells High School in Pickford, Illinois. There was a photo of him from little league in the Eighties. It looked as if he had joined every writing contest since he was in high school.

"Yep, he's your son all right." Alex mumbled.

"Now, Alex, try not to pick a fight with Miranda…" Justin requested of her. "I don't want to take you back home…."

"Hello, Justin…" Miranda called from the back parlor of the house. "I've been expecting you."

"….In my pocket." Justin finished his warning to his sister and stepped halfway into the living room area on the right side f the house. Beyond the modern sofa, chairs and furnishings before the fireplace was a small sitting area where Miranda sat sitting tea from a tea set in front of her. A Siamese was curled contently in her lap, it's bright blue eyes opening and looking up to Justin.

"And Alex too…." Miranda was dressed in a black sweater and a long green embroidered skirt. "That's weird, I thought you were… much shorter." She beamed delightfully vicious.

"No…." Justin stopped Alex from pulling her wand out and smiting Miranda. The cat hissed a bit, but Miranda stroked it and it purred to her touch. Justin turned back to her. "You were expecting us?"

"The difference between being a wizard and a witch is having the right spirit guides to tell you what's going on around you." Miranda tossed her cat's rubber mouse and it went chasing after it through the door to the kitchen. "Do you still like tea, Justin? It's chamomile." She paused and gestured to the tea set with sugar cookies on it. "I apologize for kicking you out of the house last time, but I wasn't ready for you." She looked to Alex while leaning back in her large wicker chair. "Alex, some hemlock?"

"No…." Alex stood brooding over a crystal ball on the table against the wall. "No, thank you…"

"Suit yourself…" Miranda poured tea for Justin and herself. "William has some Pepsi's in the fridge if you want one…"

"Miranda…" Justin looked to Alex heading into the kitchen and sat down across from her in a large leather chair. "I…"

"Justin Russo, a wizard…." Miranda sat grinning at him. "I never would have guessed." She sipped her tea. "You see, Justin… I've been spying on you and your family since I traveled back. Imagine what it must have been like for me to discover that while I wished I knew magic that you already did!"

"What did you see?"

"A lot…" She stroked his arm tenderly. "I'm so sorry about Juliet, but her curse wasn't because of some spell between werewolves and vampires. Their families have hated each other for generations. For her to come back to you, she would have to reject her human half."

"No…." Justin felt his heart breaking. "There has to be another way…."

"Great…" Alex stood in the archway for the kitchen as the cat ran under her feet. "Now I have to take him back to Waverly Place going… Juliet!" She exaggerated Justin's heartbreak. "Juliet…. Oh my Juliet! – Thanks a lot, Miranda!" She tipped back the can of Pepsi back to her lips for a sip then changed her attitude. "Wait a minute, what about Mason? How do I help Mason?"

"I'm sorry, Alex…" Miranda stroked her cat and tossed his mouse this time into the living room. "But you've been trying to hurt Mikayla and that affects my son, I'm not making any predictions for you." She sipped her tea. "All I will tell you is that you find your one true love and live almost happily ever after, children, stretch marks and all…" She broke a cookie from the tea tray and nibbled at it. "Oh yeah, and watch out for Jerold Flick."

"Who's Jerold Flick?" Alex echoed back.

"Never mind that…" Justin grieved for Juliet, reasserted himself and tried to contain his broken heart. "Miranda, our son's book is going to ruin Alex, Max and myself. If it gets released, it could out us as wizards. You got to get him to change the names and change the facts a bit."

"Justin, there is no chance your magic will be exposed by the movie." Her cat jumped into her lap with its rubber mouse in its mouth.

"But when Harper traveled back, she said…"

"That Harper is from a different future than me." Miranda revealed. "Think about it. She travels back in time and takes a job that someone else originally got and alters the time stream, writes a series of books that never existed before and changes history a bit more, buys property away from someone who was going to buy it, altering the timeline a bit more and her books and stories influence and change the lives of people around her further changing history around her like ripples from a pond tossed in a pool until it no longer resembles what it once was. That future no longer happens and another one takes its place. Instead of getting together with Harper or even Juliet, you meet and get together with someone else. That's how it works…"

"You and me…" Justin forced a little grin.

"I'm sorry, Justin…." Miranda didn't mean to break his heart. "But William isn't your son."

"What?" Alex refused to believe it. "But they're so much alike!" She picked up a framed photo from the back table with Miranda and a baby boy. "Look, he looks just like Justin at his age! Well, except he doesn't have Justin's vacuous eye spinning thing."

"Hey!"

"Don't touch my stuff, Alex." Miranda stood and swayed her off. "And, no, he doesn't." She took back at the picture of her baby boy.

"Alex!" Justin groaned out loud and rose from the chair. "Didn't I tell you not to pick a fight with Miranda?"

"Why not?" Alex pulled out her wand. "I think I can take her."

There was another flash of light inside the house and the front door opened wide and slammed shut after two inexperienced wizards were tossed out by whipped up poltergeist energies. Alex landed flat to the walkway, but Justin landed in the grass this time. His sister moaning and groaning next to him, he listened to Miranda cackling in the house. A second later, Alex's wand came flying out, impaling itself two inches into the grass by her head. The front door slammed shut again.

"Ahhh…" Justin grinned through his pain. "Just two inches from my old spot; I thought I'd miss it." He glared toward his sister. "Didn't I say not to tick her off?"

"No!" Alex moaned and rolled over to her back. "You said try not to pick a fight with Miranda… She started it!" She groaned miserably from the pain in her head, back and knee. "Uhhhh, my back…." Justin just lay on the soft earth tapping the concrete walkway with his fingers.

"I should have come alone…" He thought aloud. "I should have known there'd be trouble the second I heard Alex say, "I'll go!" "


	6. Chapter 6

6

A strange thing happened when a photography team from Orion Studios headed over to open up the old Hamburger Hut on Decatur Street to clean it up and prep it for filming "_The Wizards of Lexington Avenue_," now since renamed "_Witchcraft" _to reflect the magic and horror motif of the movie. The old fast food place had access to an upstairs loft apartment like the script, but it had been out of business for over a year. When the advance crew got inside to start the clean up and remodeling for the movie, one thing after another began happening. It was almost as if the place was cursed. The wiring was shot, the plumbing didn't work and the walls started collapsing. When Donna Prepone, the locations director for Orion Studios, heard the news, she began calling back the other locations she liked on the list of places she had visited. Among them was the Waverly Station Sub Shop over on Waverly, but this time, she talked to the wife than the husband.

"A mysterious structural collapse?" Theresa heard the story and looked to Max, sharing a secret as her teenaged son twirled his wand. "The ceiling came crashing down?" She listened to Prepone on the phone. "The worst termite infestation seen in years? Advanced corrosion on the pipes?"

"That one was a bit hard to do." Max smiled and nodded his head proud of his accomplishment.

"Thank you, thank you so much!" Theresa hung up the phone grinning and then cheered excitedly. She hugged her teenage son lovingly and cheered again. "Jerry! Kids! Come on down!"

"What is it?" Jerry came down ahead of them from the loft into the restaurant. "Did Alex do something? What did she do?" He spun around to his daughter. "Alex, what am I going to do with you?"

"No, Jerry, this is good news!" Theresa was about to burst from excitement. "The Hamburger Hut collapsed on itself! They're going to be doing the movie here!"

"What?" Jerry was incredulous. The kids cheered and started dancing obnoxiously. "Yes! Yes! Five freaking million dollars come to poppa!" He clapped his hands loudly. "First things first, we send Alex and Max to boarding school, Justin and Harper to college, close the shop and vanish to Monte Carlo…." He shook invisible dice at an imaginary crap table and imagined fame and fortune. "Give me Lucky Seven!"

"What?" The kids screamed upset.

"I want a car!" Justin called first.

"My own apartment!" Alex pictured it with black walls, black lights and her very own furniture.

"A boa constrictor!" Max wanted a pet.

"You get a snake…" Harper warned him. "And I'm out of here! I'll move in with Alex!"

"Wait!" Theresa stopped their dreaming. "I renegotiated the deal a bit." Everyone paused and listened to her. "Instead of a huge cash settlement, we get an all expense paid trip to Disneyland for all of us!" She grinned excitedly. "It starts next month when they arrive to start filming."

"What?" Jerry's bubble burst.

"Alex in the happiest place on Earth?" Justin smirked back a laugh. "It won't stand a chance."

"I am not going to Disneyland!" Alex folded her arms before her in defiance. "Can we exchange it for the Mall of America?"

"I got this…" Harper pushed her way around Justin and Max to get near Alex. "Alex, you can stay in the hotel with room service, a giant TV and come down later to shoot spit wads at the Disney characters."

"I can do Disneyland…." Alex finally started grinning.

"This could work." Jerry settled down a bit as trucks pulled up alongside the curb outside the shop. "We still get a vacation, and I'm sure we can have a good time ourselves." He paused and thought about it. "Justin, there's a spell you can invoke to keep the film crew from finding the lair."

"Yeah…" Justin noticed photographers carrying lights and gear into the shop. "Mom, when did you say they were to start shooting?"

"Oh, this is just for a photo shoot!" Theresa came out to meet Dan Henstridge, the executive photographer. "They're here to take pictures with the main actors in the film." She and Jerry met and shook hands with Henstridge. He was a huge African American man with the frame of a Marine or football player. Alex just froze where she was. Did her mother just say the main actors for the movie were coming into the shop? That meant Ashley Tisdale, Justin Bieber and….

"Mikayla, put down the cell phone and get your ass in gear!" Margo came in with the photography crew.

"No, she couldn't be here." Alex's eyes went on alert; she just sat where she was and didn't look behind her. "Harper, please tell me that…"

"Hello, Russo…."

Alex winced from an imaginary pain before turning around. Slowly turning around, she looked behind her and once again recognized the only pop star to ever report Hannah Montana to Homeland Security for her singing. Standing there in a designer blouse, blue jeans and a fedora and leather jacket, the pop bad girl stood smiling at Alex knowing full well how her presence tied Alex's stomach in knots.

"Did you miss me?"

"With every bullet so far!"

"So funny!" Mikayla loved the fact that just showing up seemed to annoy Alex a lot. "You know… I never would have guessed that I'd be filming in your parents' restaurant." She grinned venomously at her. "Be a good waitress, now and get me a Diet Coke."

"Sure!" Alex forced a grin. "With or without the hemlock?" The two started burning toward each other.

"Oh my god! Oh my god!" Justin and Max couldn't stop grinning. "She's here! You're here. You're Mikayla!" A big excited grin spread across his face about to burst. Max was looking for a pen for an autograph; Justin was jumping and fussing like a young kid. "I am such a big fan! I think you're so beautiful."

"Thank you…." Mikayla tilted her head a bit and shined toward Justin.

"Beautiful?" Harper was growing jealous. "Justin, don't you think there's a bit of a resemblance between…"

"No resemblance! No resemblance at all!" Justin knew where she was going with that line of questioning. Alex rolled her eyes and tried to wander away from the spectacle.

"Can I ask a question?" Max handed her a pen and an order pad to autograph. "If you and Katy Perry got in a fight, who would win?"

"Wow…" Mikayla gave him his autograph. That now topped the stupidest question she had ever been asked. Scribbling her name for the kid, she turned back to Justin as her next prospective boyfriend. "So, did you buy my last CD?"

"Yeah…" Justin wasn't sure if she was flirting with him. "But I only had it for about ten minutes. You see, every time I get one of your CDs or DVDs, Alex tosses it of the balcony."

"Oh, Russo….." Mikayla looked over to Alex standing beyond the sandwich counter. "Do you hate me that much?"

"Do you have to ask?" Alex stood shaking her head in disapproval. Her eyes bobbed down to the pop star's chest. "Why aren't you wearing that necklace I gave you?"

"Oh," Mikayla looked down. "I chucked that ugly thing, but someone found my grandmother's necklace after I lost it and sent it to me." She looked down to admire it. Alex just somehow knew that person had to be Miranda. "But I just loved that glowing essay you posted on my website." Mikayla continued.

"Thank you!" Harper perked up grinning. "I really worked hard on it!" Alex suddenly groaned and lowered her head. Mikayla looked at her and back to Alex.

"I should have known you wouldn't write it!" Mikayla signed another autograph for Justin. "Well, Russo, this is really going to mess you up!" She grabbed Justin, pulled him close to herself and planted her lips against his and kissed him hard and furiously. Harper's eyes went wild, Alex dropped her jaw in disgust and looked away and Max watched in amazement as the pop star loosened her grip and Justin dropped to the floor with a big happy smile on her face.

"Great!" Alex shook her head in disgust. "I'm never going to get that image out of my head…." She paused covering up her face in horror. "Plus…" She looked back. "Now, Justin has to have his face washed and sterilized and get inoculated against rabies!"

"Hey! Hey!" Margo finally turned away from arguing with the photographers. She noticed the teenaged boy on the floor, her star and the brunette staring each other down and feared the worse. "What's going on over here? What are you kids doing?"

"Margo…" The teenage pop star turned to her manager. "You know that girl always who's always bad-mouthing me on my website? This… is Alex Russo!"

Margo looked the two over back and forth noticing their similarities. Alex was intensely brooding; Mikayla was gleefully smiling and enjoying herself.

"Security!" Margo's shrill voice screamed for the guys supposed to be watching the closed set.

"I'm going…" Alex turned away and retreated to the kitchen to watch in disgust from further away. Her mother helped her gleefully happy brother off the floor. Still grinning, Justin looked over as Mikayla grinned and flirted with him as the photographer set additional lights to photograph her in the shop. Jerry and Theresa just tried to sit and watch out of the way as their shop became a photo shoot. Instead of coming in to eat, customers slowed and peaked in watching the events unfold. Feeling her stomach tying in knots, Alex paced and fretted as her feet paced back and forth in the kitchen. Every spell she tried to strike at Mikayla was bouncing off her because of Miranda's spells of protection. Even Harper was distracted by the event unfolding in the shop. Max tapped Mikayla on the shoulder.

"Alex, buck up…" Harper tried to cheer up Alex. "We are about to meet Justin Bieber! He's playing Justin in the movie!"

"Harper, do I look happy?"

"How could things get worse?"

"Excuse me, but I got another question…" Max got the teen actress's attention again and looked into Mikayla's big brown eyes. "If you were in the forest and fell over, would anyone be there to hear it?"

"Oh my god…" Mikayla looked away as if her life was passing before her eyes. "That question is actually stupider than the first one." She looked away in disbelief. "Could this day get any more surreal?"

"Chad Dylan Cooper… in the house!" The blonde star of the syndicated teen drama known as "Mackenzie Falls" walked straight into the shop past Jerry Russo and the crew setting up cameras. His once blonde hair, however, had been dyed dark brown, but Harper recognized him anyway and started screaming excitedly. Standing with his arms held out to accept all his praise, he winked at both Harper then Alex who just rolled her eyes and stuck her finger in her mouth trying to vomit her lunch. The TV star just grinned, spun around again and noticed Mikayla. She looked at him confused. Where were Bieber and Tisdale?

"Hey, Mikayla…." He advanced on her and draped his left arm around her shoulders, taking her fedora and putting it on his head. "What's up?" He flashed a gang gesture. "I haven't seen you since the party Britney Spears tossed in Malibu."

"Yeah," She recalled it. "Isn't that the party where the Jonas Brothers tossed you off the back of the house?"

"No!" He reacted upset. "They didn't toss me off; I was just proving to them how I did all my own stunts." He lied. "And besides, I really thought there would be water down there."

"What are you doing here?" She asked him then noticed his dark locks. "What's wrong with your hair?"

"Oh…" Chad got to the point. "Bieber had to back out because of a scheduling error so they decided to call in a real actor." He grinned. "I'm playing your brother in the movie." He reacted excitedly.

"No!" Justin overheard him and refused to accept the recast part of Jason Russell. "No, no, no, no, no, no, no!" Not Chad Dylan Cooper! Not that pompous egomaniac! He really wanted Zac Efron, and he might have accepted Justin Bieber, but there was no way he was going to accept a teenage television star who refused to drink bottled water unless it had his own face on it. "No! No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no… No!" He turned and marched toward the kitchen area with his sister.

"Alex," Justin confronted her brooding in the kitchen. "Bad news, Justin Bieber isn't coming. They got Chad Dylan Cooper playing me instead! I hate that guy."

Alex suddenly lit up with an idea.

"Justin Bieber isn't coming?" Harper looked as if she was about to cry. "But I was going to marry him and have his babies."

"Forget that!" Alex was never more dangerous when she was happy. "Justin, you and me, combining our wizard powers. I bet the two of us together could really break Miranda's hold on this movie and screw it up."

"With you?" Justin was now about to break the rules. "Why would I want to help you?"

"I'm a wizard!" Chad had found a stage prop to use as a wand and was pretending to cast spells in a series of crazy spells. "I'm a wizard! I'm Jason Russell, the king of teenage wizards!" He imitated the cocky loud laughter of screen great Errol Flynn.

"I'll do it…" In the kitchen, Justin and Alex shook hands.

"Excuse me, but can I ask another question…" Max came up behind Mikayla practicing to cast a fake wizard spell. "If you was on a train heading to Hollywood at forty miles an hour from Nashville, and my sister was traveling to Hollywood on a train fifty miles an hour from Chicago, who would get there first?"

Mikayla stared at him as if he wasn't real.

"What the heck is wrong with you, kid?" Mikayla asked him. "You make my little brother look like a genius, and he picks his nose and grins about it."


	7. Chapter 7

7

The photo shoot lasted five hours with Chad and Mikayla posing with wands in the booths, at the tables and on the stairs to the loft. Ashley Tisdale finally came down from Toronto with her brunette locks where she was filming the last post-production shots of a superhero movie called "Sky Girl," and the three teen stars got together shooting promotional pictures in groups of two, three and solo. In those five hours, Jerry and Theresa sold more sandwiches to the photography crew than they usually did in the week. Justin swooned over both Mikayla and Ashley, Alex hid in the lair screaming her head off and Max asked Tisdale whether or not she thought she could beat Kaley Cuoco up in a fight. For dinner, Jerry ordered the kids pizza and then worked with Theresa to close the shop up almost an hour after their normal closing hours. After doing their chores, Alex and Justin retreated to the lair to start their plotting. With them, they took along the film script that Mikayla had left behind. She and Chad had run a few lines with it to test their chemistry as brother and sister for the movie. Upon seeing them playing the roles of Jason and Ashley Russell, Jerry and Theresa felt a sense of déjà vu and looked back to Alex and Justin. That was when the two teenage wizards realized they had to stop this movie from being made!

"Okay, Justin…" Alex stood over her brother sitting in the chair. "What spell can we inflict on Mikayla and Chad that won't come back on us three times stronger?"

"It would have to be a spell…" Justin sat brooding with his fingers interlaced then crossed his lips with his forefinger while deep in thought. "…That would not come off as malicious." His mind poured back over old wizard lessons, incantations he had read about in old grimoires and hexes he had only heard about at Wiz-Tech and his brief internship to Hogwarts.

"And that spell is…" Alex asked him.

"I have no idea."

Alex groaned defeatedly.

"You got to be kidding me!" She whirled around anxiously desperate to gain an upper hand. "You're supposed to be so smart yet you can't think of one spell we can use against two actors?"

"It's not that easy, Alex…" Justin put his hands down and hopped up on to his feet. "Any spell we cast on Chad and Mikayla to knock them out of the movie is going to bounce back on us three times stronger." He sighed. "Maybe we ought to just give in and accept seeing ourselves played by…" He cringed with embarrassing pain. "Chad Dylan Cooper and Mikayla…."

"No, I'm not giving up…." Alex turned for the family spell book as Justin sighed and started out of the lair. "I'll get them out of playing us if I have to stick them into the movie itself!" She dropped Mikayla's script into the chair.

Justin came rushing back into the lair.

"That's it!" He cried out excitedly. "The Literary Terrarium spell!" He chuckled a bit. "It's non-hostile, it's non-threatening, and it's perfect!" Justin turned the spell book around to face him. "Plus, it's a horror movie; getting to experience it for real will mess them up so bad that they won't want to star in it!"

"Yes!" Alex jumped up and down cheering her brother acting more like her. "If they want to play wizards so badly, let's send them to meet some wizards!"

Justin looked up at her.

"Other than us…" Alex added to her statement. Justin resorted to the same long-distance device that Alex had been using to smite Mikayla with curses. He ripped pictures of Chad and Mikayla from one of Alex's teenage gossip magazines and took the semi-burnt long distance candle from where his father kept it. Alex was grinning ear to ear. She opened Mikayla's script to the party scene in the movie, struck a match and lit it as Justin prepared the ritual.

"Chad Dylan Cooper and Mikayla, _Literary Terrarium_!" He held their images to the flame as Max entered the room with one of the pizza boxes.

"Hey, guys…" He watched them burning faces from a magazine. "Do you want your pizza crusts?" The small burning magazine clippings exploded into much more smoke than was expected. Alex was flung backward from the impact and landed on her back. Justin was knocked around trying to keep from falling over. He staggered around a bit and righted himself bumping into someone as distant music from beyond his ears started getting louder. It was the loud pop concussions of "The Monster Mash" by Sixties great pop star Bobby Pickett, and the person he had bumped into was a shapely blonde beauty in a cat woman costume.

"Excuse me, sweetie, but this dance floor is big enough for all of us." She grinned and kissed Justin with her ruby red lipstick and turned to continue dancing with a guy in a Spiderman costume. Waving off the smoke, Justin looked around turning on his heel. He was in the brightly lit Colorado Lounge from the Hotel Overlook, the location from "The Shining." This was one of the movies that William Russo had based the script on when he wrote it. It was a huge room of Western motif under two balconies, a wall of Western relics and a fireplace to the front and windows to the back stretching up to a high ceiling with a period chandelier alighted with modern electricity. The tall glass windows were dark to the back; the distant snowy Colorado Mountains looming with tall shadows over the structure. Covered in streamers and Halloween decorations from cardboard skeletons to plastic bats, the lounge area was full of somewhere between seventy-five to a hundred kids or more. Their costumes ranged from cheap store-bought that barely fit to professionally made creations. A white-faced Princess Leia danced with a tall Wookiee hybrid, fake looking vampires wandered through with scantly clad girls in lingerie and capes and a guy in a Frankenstein Monster sat between Freddie Kruger and a fake zombie on the sofa getting drunk.

"You've got to be kidding me!" Justin whirled around in shocked surprise. "You've got to be kidding me!" He repeated himself. "It bounced back?"

"Justin!" Alex jumped around a guy in a storm trooper costume and a girl dressed as a member of the Borg. "What happened? I thought there was no way this spell could bounce back and hit us!"

"Apparently Miranda's enchantment on Chad and Michayla involves all spells cast on them!" He tried yelling over the music. "Not just ones of mischievous intent."

"What?" She couldn't hear him over the loud music.

"I said…" Justin started to explain then chose not to try. He stood with his hand to his head frustratingly then whirled around the crowd of high school kids choking the room. Sighing within his small oasis of space between gyrating and convulsing fictional teenagers trying to dance, he watched as Alex tried releasing herself out of the script. It wasn't working.

"It's not going to work…" He tapped Alex by the shoulder as the song winded down toward getting replaced by Ray Parker Jr. singing the "Ghost Busters" theme. "The spell bounced back three times stronger than how we cast it. We're stuck here until Max on the outside lets us out."

"I'm stuck in this movie with god awful Eighties music?" Alex put her hands over her ears as the dancing around changed to jumping and thrashing with a lot of the partygoers shouting "Ghost Busters" along with the song. "I've got to get out of here!" She turned and pushed through a pirate, a fake werewolf and a guy dressed as a bearded wizard. At the piano at the base of the stairway, she found her brother again. This guy looked exactly like Justin! He was dressed as Dracula in a black cape with red lining. He scanned Alex to check her out as the real Justin pushed through and met his clone.

"Hi, I'm Jason Russell…" Jason's movie counterpart was moving to the beat of the music as he set aside his beer can and reached to shake Justin's hand. "Thanks for coming to my party!" He raised his voice over the sound of music, laughter and camaraderie. "Food and drinks are over there…" He pointed to the tables where Jack Nicholson had spent his typing in "The Shining." "Restrooms are over there…" He pointed to the opposite corner. "The rooms upstairs are off limits." He grinned as the cordial host enjoying his bacchanalia of unfettered freedom-wanting teenagers.

"He's just like you!" Alex looked to Justin shocked to realize Jason looked just like him. How was that possible?

"This is impossible!" Justin looked to Jason then back to Alex amidst the crowded revelries. "How could William know exactly what I look like? I know he based his stories on our lives…" He looked to Jason as the traffic officer of this disordered madness. In some way, Jason was him; and he was Jason. They were two parts of one character, the real and the fictional.

"Hey, Jason," Mack Lambert was Jason's African-American friend, a character based on someone from William's past. "Your sister just showed up!"

"What?" Jason and Justin looked over in unison. Coming from the hall to the front of the hotel was Alex and Harper, or as they were known here, Ashley Russell and Hannah Dinkle. It was almost as if he had traveled back in time to visit a lost memory. They also looked exactly like their real world counterparts.

"No!" Jason refused to allow it. "I told her! Only seniors! No juniors!" He pushed through his classmates to confront her and get rid of her. Justin watched with stunned anxiety. This was wrong… very wrong. This wasn't just some story written by a writer who had visions of his life; this was a story by a writer who _knew_ his life!

"But how could he know…" He was getting confused. The loud music made it hard to think. "Alex… Alex?"

Alex was a few feet away dancing with a cute guy dressed as the Six Million Dollar Man. Rolling his eyes a bit annoyed, he walked over, tugged her by the arm and dragged her over under the balcony where they could talk.

"Alex," Justin faced her down. "William claimed that he knew us by only very vague dreams he had about us." He explained himself. "Those dreams could not have been that vague if he's got perfect images of what we look like!" He paused and realized something worse. "Oh god, do you realize if the spell had worked, Chad and Mikayla would have still figured out we're wizards." He looked at his sister. "Maybe we should consider ourselves lucky that it backfired on us. We came really close to actually busting ourselves as wizards!"

"Oh my god…" Alex glanced across the lodge, and her jaw dropped to see her fictional counterpart with a fictional Harper; the two of them bickering with Jason while trying to get into the party. "Justin, get us out of here. I want to go back to the shop!"

"What part of three times three do you not understand?" Justin looked back to his fictional counterparts in the script. "When Miranda's spell on Mikayla bounced it back, it came back at us at three hundred percent! That's one hundred and fifty percent for each of us!"

"Math work… headache…." Alex stressed out and paced in a circle. "But you changed me back after I got shrunk."

"But I didn't need a counter-spell for that." Justin revealed. "All I had to do was use a cancellation spell. For Literary Terrarium, the only counter spell is the counter spell which we can't use because Miranda's protection spell altered the intensity of the original spell. Don't you do ANY magic homework?"

"Don't push me, Justin!" They clashed a bit. Alex fretted and tried to think. "How long are we going to be stuck here?"

"Until Max gets us out…"

"Hey, guys…." Max came wandering through the crowd with a plate of food. "Isn't this party great! They've got all my favorites!" Justin and Alex looked at each other in shock.

"What are you doing here?" Alex turned to him eating a hot dog. "You're supposed to be outside getting us out!"

"I am?" Max finished his hot dog and set his plate of junk food and finger delicacies aside on a table. "Okay, Literary Terrarium…" He took out his wand and waved it before him. "I tried. Anyone want more shrimp?"

Alex was freaking out. She was trapped in a story where almost everyone died in the end. Justin was fighting the compulsion to smack his younger brother around. Why were they always getting into these predicaments? It was almost as if their lives were a really bad TV series on the Disney Channel.

"Okay…" Justin composed himself. "With Max, the spell is at its full hundred power for each of us instead of the regular thirds…"

"Good… Justin's thinking…." Alex followed his lead. "He can get us out."

"Except…" Justin turned to her. "There's no one on the outside with the magic powers to let us out!" He turned and ran from the hotel screaming for his father. It might have been night, but he felt as if he had a better chance as illogical as it was by yelling at the sky than the ceiling. Alex raced out after him to help him scream. Max returned to the snack table, dumped the shrimp and lobster puffs into his pockets, and grabbed two more hot dogs, a hand full of large potato chips and a bottle of Pepsi before joining them.


	8. Chapter 8

8

"What was that explosion?" Jerry and Theresa entered the lair waving away smoke to help him see better. "Alex? Where are you?"

"Justin?" Theresa looked over and around the sofa. "Max?" Coughing a bit on the mystical smoke, she reached and felt around the floor, over the bookcase and the shelf and came around the sofa. Jerry found the dropped pizza box with the scattered teeth-worn crusts near the entryway, but no other trace of his kids. The mystical residue was dissipating and more of the room was opening up to allow it to be seen. On the table near the snuffed candle, Jerry found ashes of burned magazine images near the white pages of the lost movie script.

"They did something." He looked around. "This is a script from the movie. I saw Mikayla carrying it around this afternoon."

"What do you think Alex was trying to do with it?" Theresa reacted with concern.

"I don't know." Jerry stressed out a bit; his anxiety was getting worse as he paced around. "Whatever they did must have affected all the kids, but without them here, I have no way to go and confront Miranda to revoke the spell."

"Uh, Jerry…" Theresa had an idea. "How about instead of using magic to go confront her, you use the telephone to call her?"

Jerry looked up with an idea.

"I can use the phone to call her!"

"Brilliant, genius!" Theresa rolled her eyes as Jerry scanned around looking for a phone in the lair. Not seeing a cell phone laying around, he decided to use the phone in the shop. Using it to tap out the number for Information, he hoped William still had a landline active in Boston. At that time back in the historical city that was the scene of so many historical events, Miranda Russo laid in the bed of her son's guest room. A copy of _The Crucible_ set aside her, the book rested opened on its pages as Miranda sat back against the headboard of the bed talking by the lamp on the nightstand talking on the phone. Garbed in her nightgown, she shined happily to talk to her son in Manhattan.

"Mom, I can't believe a story I wrote is being made into a movie." William was staying the Manhattan Hotel Tipton in a seventeenth floor suite paid for by the studio. "I'm literally watching everything come to life in front of me."

"I'm proud of you, sweetie." She grinned for him. "When will you be home?"

"This weekend." William picked at the last of the chicken dinner he had ordered to his room. "I can't wait to see it when it all comes out. The Bartilson House on Staten Island they chose for the house in the movie is scarier and better than I imagined."

"I'm sure it is…" The phone pedestal on the nightstand buzzed; she looked over to the caller ID on it and read, "Waverly Street Sub Station" in black digital letters.

"You've got to be kidding me." She mumbled annoyingly to be bothered by them again.

"Who is it, mom?"

"No one, honey…." Miranda rolled her eyes. "I'll talk to you in the morning. I love you."

"Love you, too…" William hung up and Miranda tapped the release button on the phone.

"Hello there, Mr. Russo…." She dragged the syllables out trying to be as annoying to him as he was to her and checked her fingernails casually. "What is it this time? Back pains from flying off my son's porch?"

"Spare me the commentary!" Jerry sounded upset.

"Give it to her, Jerry!" Theresa stood by her husband on the shop counter telephone.

"What did you do to my kids?" Jerry yelled upset.

"Did Alex try cursing Mikayla again?" Miranda sunk down with the phone under her ear as she casually ran an emery board over her nails. "No disrespect, but this sounds like a problem with Alex. Why are you dragging me into this?"

"Because I can't get through to Alex!" Jerry sounded off on Manhattan supported by his wife cheering him on in his tirade. "Take your spell off!"

"All I've got is a nice safe protection spell around Mikayla, Justin Bieber and Ashley Tisdale... and now apparently around Chad Dylan Cooper." Miranda worked on her fingernails in Boston. "Is it my fault someone else is trying to curse them?"

Back on Waverly Place, Theresa tugged at Jerry. "What's going on?" She asked.

"She's being difficult." Jerry looked at Theresa. "Look," He spoke again over the phone to the time-traveling reputed mother of his possible grown-up grandson in Boston. "I have no idea what sort of spell Alex tried to cast…"

Miranda yawned and checked the time.

"But even if I did, " He continued. "I don't have Justin or Max here this time to undo it because of your stupid witchcraft rule of three-times-three hit all my kids!"

"Why don't you do it?" Miranda resisted with a light sigh.

"Because I don't have any wizard powers; I gave it all up to get married." Jerry argued back.

"Seriously?" Miranda had never heard of such a thing. "Are you making this up?"

"Why would I make such a thing up?"

"Okay, okay…" Miranda stopped working on her nails and sat up in bed. "What do you want me to do?"

"Take off the protection spell from Mikayla!"

"Not going to do it…" Miranda moved the phone to her other ear. "Besides, even if I removed it, it wouldn't undo a spell already deflected."

"Then undo Alex's spell!"

"I can't undo a wizard spell…" Miranda confessed. "It would be like a plumber trying to do an electrical job. There are different mystical energies involved here… pagan and extra-dimensional. What kind of wizard were you? You should know this!"

Jerry groaned and looked at his wife in front of him. Theresa was worried sick. Where were her kids? She started poking him again.

"What's going on?" She implored Jerry to fix things.

"Witchcraft is incompatible with wizardry." He told her then put the phone back to his ear. "How am I going to find out what spell Alex did?"

"Well…" Miranda yawned getting tired. "Have you asked your spirit guides?"

"Wizards don't have spirit guides." Jerry was getting more and more annoyed. "Even you should know that!"

"Okay…" Miranda rolled her eyes tiredly. "Hold your phone out to the room."

"Okay…" Jerry held the phone at arm's length into the shop.

"What are you doing?" Theresa responded to him.

"She's helping…" Jerry looked at her as Miranda incanted.

"I call upon the watchtowers of the north…" Miranda's voice called out from the phone. "By the powers of earth, air, fire and water… Lady Hecate and Mother Earth, Lord Hades in the underworld… Reveal to me the voices of all earthbound spirits of Waverly Place!" Theresa heard her voice and felt the shop tremble a bit. The astral energies in the shop took the form of wispy cloudy forms of ethereal fog. In the empty spaces of those energy masses, Theresa's eyes widened to see the ghost of one their old customers sitting in a booth with a menu. He had died of a car accident a year prior. The specter of a Union Soldier saluted Jerry and walked out through the wall. The sounds of giggling children echoed from upstairs from the former schoolhouse next door now used as a boarding house. Clutching Jerry closely, Theresa remained terrified by the flying shapes and figures walking past them and into the street. The air seemed to groan and whistle as they dashed around the shop around the tables and over the lights. Jerry instead grinned excitedly. A lost sewer worker's apparition poked up from the floor and dipped back in. A trio of phantom gangsters from Prohibition saluted Jerry as a fellow Italian, and as the energies faded away, a ghostly little girl played hopscotch through the tables and chairs and waved excitedly before dematerializing back into the astral plane. It had only lasted about a minute. Theresa held her heart as Jerry replaced the phone to his ear.

"Is that it?" He asked Miranda. "What happened?"

"Who the heck is Mantooth and why does he want to know if Justin remembers him?" Miranda had heard several messages from the earthbound spirits. Some of them wanted to know what year it was while others wanted updates on old events. Some of the ghosts were annoyed by the amount of magic flying around the shop while others wanted to contact their relatives.

"Forget Mantooth!" Jerry snapped. "What did he say?"

"What's a Literary Terrarium spell?"

"The script!" Jerry had a flash as he realized what had happened. "They went into the script!" Jerry turned to face his wife.

"Can she get them out?"

"Can you get them out?" Jerry asked Miranda.

"I can't undo a wizard spell…" The shapely brunette witch repeated herself.

"Well, then we're right back where we were before!" Jerry stressed and walked back and forth with the phone. "Without one of the kids here, I can't help them!" He looked to his wife. "Would it bother you if I called my brother, Kelbo, here?"

"Jerry…" Theresa was getting antsy by the moment not knowing what her kids were going through in the script. "How bad is this going to get?"

"Uhhhh…" Miranda groaned annoyingly. "I can't undo a wizard spell… but I do have a regular spell I can invoke that can make you young again for thirty minutes. Maybe that will briefly reinstate your magic."

"I'll do it." Jerry would do anything for his kids… maybe almost anything. "Theresa, " He looked to his wife. "She can make me young again. I could get my wizard powers back."

"Go for it, Jerry…"

In the script, Justin, Max and Alex had lived through the scene where Ashley Russell had held a séance to attract the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel standing in for the fictional Highland Hall. Alex had even participated in it, making jokes and cracking lines through it as Jason Russell came in to break it up. Neither of them noticed they were complete clones of Justin and Alex. Following that scene, the fictional Harper counterpart known as Hannah Dinkle claimed to have seen the apparition of a woman in the mansion's library and that's when the horror aspect of the story got underway. As the main characters split up looking for ghosts, Alex's literary counterpart, Ashley Russell, secreted herself off to the mansion chapel, a plot point taken from "The Legend Of Hell House," another cult horror classic with links in this script. Apparently, someone in the past of the fictional Highland Hall had dabbled in dark energies themselves and it was those occult powers that Ashley wanted. She painted the sign of the devil in the floor with black paint, placed dark candles and animal parts at the proper points and sat on the floor to offer herself to the dark forces of her world.

"I call up the dark forces of the underworld…" She chanted coldly. "Beelzebub, Asmodeus, Lilith and Ahriman… Notice me! Grant me the power I seek! I offer you my brother's soul and the souls of dozens… Everyone in my presence is yours tonight! Imbue me with your power! Make me a vessel of your might!"

Through the mansion, loud knocking noises filled the structure. The servant bells started ringing loudly. Teenagers kissing and getting intimate were startled by the sounds. The rafters groaned with a voice that sounded unearthly. In the game room, Justin and Max sat defeated. They weren't sure that their father knew where they were. Alex was dancing with a handsome blonde extra in the Colorado Lounge posing as the ballroom. The night sky cracked with lightning. Justin knew the horror was starting. One by one, the water faucets in the scullery came on by themselves with water pouring through them and turning red. Alex jumped when the huge fireplace exploded into a huge blaze.

"Power…" Ashley Russell found herself surrounded by black smoke pouring the heating vents. "I want power. Give me the power over my enemies. Power over my destiny." The darkness in the room came to life and started beckoning to her. Several breezes chilled her body as the chapel became freezing cold. Her breath froze into mist in the room. "I offer my body and soul to the underworld!" The darkness suddenly gravitated to her body, wrapping around her body as a living blanket molding to her body. The smoke pouring into her mouth and painfully filling her up with the power she desired.

Several partygoers ran from the nearby gunroom screaming that the animal heads on the walls had come to life. In the toy room, partygoers playing with the tabletop train set suddenly found themselves in it as tiny figures barely half inch tall in a fake town in a massive room. The faces in portraits through the mansion melted into corpselike beings. Justin watched as the image of a beautiful woman shriveled up in front of him into a living corpse. Partygoers rushing to escape the structure watched as the main entrance slammed shut on them. Max pounded a window trying to break it, but the only thing that happened was that he shattered the chair. Alex watched as one then both of the chandeliers in the party room went out, bathing it in eternal darkness then crashed to the floor. The thunderous crashes of broken exquisite crystal echoed through the house as everyone freaked out by the sudden and rapid degradation of the structure. Justin dodged books flying off the shelves.

In the chapel, Ashley Russell laid across the symbol she had painted on the floor. The wood pews around her had smashed themselves into the walls into splinters. Her body was convulsing, shaking violently and levitating into the air. She should have been screaming in pain, but she was laughing at what was happening. She felt herself getting stronger. She felt her body changing. The buttons of her costume exploded off her body, seams in her dress ripped apart and dark energy poured in the openings to give her new attire better fitting a Queen of Darkness. Her eyes opened to complete darkness.

"Max, get under the pool table!" Justin tried to save him from the flying bric-a-brac and poltergeist activity in the game room.

"Heck, no!" Max had a croquet mallet to swat the flying objects. "When is the next time I'm going to live through a horror movie?"

"In our family? Once every five months!"

"Justin…" Terrified and powerless, Alex ran around and past scared teenagers in this massive paranormal attack. "What's happening?"

"I'd say you just made your pact with the devil…" He ran from the game room for the gallery where all the faces in the portraits had reverted into the images of grotesque and hideous undead zombies. "We've got to find Jason; he's the only real wizard here." He grabbed Max by the collar and pulled him from the hall leading to the chapel. "Don't go that way…"

"Why?"

"Hey, guys!" Mack Lambert was coming toward them. "There's a secret passage in the cellar! We might be able to get out…" Ashley's hand reached from the chapel and pulled him out of the hallway. He looked into her completely black eyes one minute and felt her unholy dress wrapping up over him. His scream filled the hall as his body vanished into hers. Down near the foyer, all Justin, Alex and Max heard was a scream dying away then a loud satisfying burp.

"Because I actually read the script…" Justin and his siblings stood in terror.

"This is going to be the best movie ever!" Max was grinning ear to ear.

"That girl is so totally not me!" Alex was offended. "I would never do stuff like this!" She looked down the hall as Ashley came drifting from the room. Her skin was white, her long dark hair trapped in a weird breeze coming from her body. It seemed to flow into the darkness of her body. Her eyes were pitch black; her grin full of sharpened teeth. It was hard to tell where her hair and dress began and ended.

"Nice dress by the way." Alex added.

"So many people…" Ashley's voice sounded sepulchral. "Who wants to be a part of me next?"

"The kitchen's this way!" Justin quickly deduced the layout of the estate and ran for it with Alex right behind him, then returned to grab his brother and save him for his own good. In the ballroom, Jason Russell tried assuring his frightened guests. The place was creaking and making several more noises than usual. Several of his friends were freaking out with the weird stuff happening.

"Guys, come on…" Jason tried to assure everyone. "The place isn't haunted! Trust me, I know this!"

"Dude!" Justin slid to a stop before his literary counterpart. "Your sister just made a pact with the devil! She's coming here to kill you and steal all our souls!"

"Justin, buddy…" Jason and Justin looked at each other. "I think I can handle anything my sister can throw at me." He mugged a bit as he fondled his wand in his fingers. Justin looked at him then over to Max and Alex.

"Please tell me I'm not really as obnoxious as he sounds." He asked.

"Pretty accurate."

"Right on the dot."

"Let me handle this." Harper's counterpart, Hannah Dinkle, sat up from the sofa and set her soft drink aside. "I can handle Ashley." She scoffed. "Trust me, she is not possessed by the Devil!"

"Yeah, that's right…" Alex stood by fictional Harper's side as she headed out of the ballroom. "You can talk her down. You just…" She turned around. "Someone help me get the furniture against the doors!" Hannah looked back as Justin and several of the remaining seniors lifted the sofa and pushed it to the other side of the doors behind her. They were barricading Hannah out with her new demonic best friend. They were moving tables and more furniture. Rolling her eyes skeptically, Hannah just turned around and looked down the long gallery that reached the length of the mansion. Several of the lights were going off one by one at the far end. There was a dark shadowy presence coming closer and closer. She felt a cold chill dance up her spine. In those dark shadows coming closer, she saw Ashley Russell coming closer. She looked practically normal except for that long black Elvira coated in dark misty smoke. Her long hair seemed longer than she recalled. Her skin was practically white, her lips blood red, her eyes were completely black. Several partiers were following her without any force of will. It was almost as if they were brainless zombies subservient to another's will. Hannah froze where she was. Maybe she should have stayed in the ballroom. She looked to the others inside the barricaded room watching her through the narrow transom over the door; sections of its plate glass decoration had been broken out in the poltergeist attack, then back to her best friend.

"Ash… Ashley?" Hannah's voice quivered. Her best friend stood before her in that long Elvira-like dress. "Wow… you sure look…" She glanced Ashley's new figure up and down. "Taller… You're just pretending aren't you? You're not really possessed, are you?"

"No, Hannah, I'm not…" Ashley grinned viciously. Her sharp vampire-like teeth linked together when she smiled.

"I knew it. You're… What?"

"I'm just going to take my brother's soul and drink his blood to honor my new dark master." She grabbed Hannah by the top of her costume and pressed her lips to hers, sucking the positive life energies from her best friend and giving her something from herself, something darker, something more negative. Hannah struggled and fought from the unholy embrace then started accepting it. She was becoming darker herself, giving in to the dark side of herself. From the transom, Alex watched herself turning her best friend's doppleganger into a demonic minion similar to the others.

"Okay, now that's just tacky…" Alex made a face.

"This could be worse than I thought." Jason realized as he too watched from on top of the barricade and over the door.

"You think?" Justin looked at him. When they looked back, they realized Hannah was possessed as well. Her eyes were all black as well. Her hair was turning darker as well. She was embracing her dark side but unlike the others cursed by Ashley, she still had her own free will and she now wanted to help Ashley get what she wanted. Grinning over what she had just accomplished, Ashley Russell recognized her brother watching her through the transom. She started growling under breath as her eyes started glowing. She was building up her power for a spell.

"Get away from the door!" Justin and everyone started jumping off the barricade against the doors as Ashley's heightened occult power allowed her to blast her way through it. A psychic onslaught of powerful occult energy burst the doors open and threw the furniture aside. She cackled loudly as she marched into the room. Her possessed allies ambled like zombies behind her. Her brother had been tossed to the floor in the blast. She glided up to him eager to take his soul from him.

"What's the matter, Jason?" She grinned at him with a mouth of sharp teeth. "No hug for your little sister?" Her head twitched and contortedly psychotically.

"Hug this!" He blasted her with energy from his wand but it barely fazed her. A few feet away, Justin pulled Alex up to save her and tried to dodge around Ashley's zombie horde of possessed partygoers. Teens were fighting possessed teens with weapons. Living kids were battling undead animated teens with weapons and fisticuffs. The demonized Hannah Dinkle preyed like a vampire on a boy from her gym class. party had turned from frenzy to a fight for life and death around a battle between good and evil. Ashley danced and vaulted over the ceiling and walls as her brother tried fighting her. Justin cracked a chair over one of the cursed high school kids, and Alex picked up a piece of broken furniture to strike at anyone who came near her. Her clone in her possessed state continued fighting her brother's counterpart with dark magic and poltergeist effects. Max watched and dodged between fighting teenagers and flying bric-a-brac.

"This is so cool!" Max loved the horror action. "I'm seeing this movie five times!"

"Get out of the house!" Justin started to rush from the room, but Ashley rebuilt the barricade with a gesture, imprisoning everyone in the room with her. Her brother's wizard powers were no match for her.

"Oh, come on!" Justin screamed. He had to keep Alex, Max and himself alive long enough until their father could find a way to get them out of this movie script and do it with his wizard spells. His sister's movie counterpart and his movie counterpart were fighting each other like that young wizard and that dark lord in all the J. K. Rowling movies with Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, but around them, it was practically "_Night of the Living Dead_."

"Justin!" Alex was trying to break through the window to escape this place. "Do something!"

"I don't know what to…." Justin heard a loud crash of energy as the piano lifted itself up and smashed into the teenage succubus named Ashley Russell, knocking her across the room, but that feat of magic was not created by her brother. There was someone else, another kid at the top of the stairs. He was eighteen with a mullet of long dark hair and two intense brown eyes. His bearing was familiar. His gestures with his wand expertly cast. When Ashley reared herself up immune from that attack, he expertly and mystically lifted the two shattered chandeliers and smashed them into her. Justin looked this other wizard closer and acknowledged his face.

"Dad?" Justin and Alex somehow recognized him in disbelief together.

"Kids, up here!" He called for his kids as Jason used the distraction to fight his demonic sister and his undead animated friends to protect the survivors, mystically reducing his undead classmates into ash then reweaving the curtains in the room to contain his dark sister and pummel her with magical lightning. Enjoying being a teenager again, Jerry hugged his daughter closely and grabbed Max by the arm as Justin rushed to join him. Ashley tore through of her fabric restraints as Jason whipped up a hurricane in the mansion. Their battle was far from over…

"Literary terrarium!" Jerry screamed, and everything went white. The four of them were popping from one false reality to the real world. Things became real once more. The laws of reality and the rules of magic suddenly applied and everyone was back in the lair on Waverly Place. In the middle of the spell, Jerry reverted back to his true age, and instead of her young spry and handsome father, Alex was again holding him as a middle-aged man. Theresa was there to hug and kiss her lost kids. Looking at his old face in the mirror, Jerry groaned. Miranda's youth spell must have burned up in that massive display of magic. Theresa kissed and hugged and smothered her kids with love.

"My babies are back!" She kissed Justin and Max and squeezed Alex. "They're alive! Oh, my little babies!"

"Whoa!" Justin staggered around. "Dad, how did you…"

"Miranda made me young again to save you kids." Jerry gasped and dropped tiredly to the chair. "It never felt so good to have my powers back…" He paused grinning proudly. "Alex, what were you thinking in using a literary terrarium spell on…"

"Well, uh…"Alex tried thinking up a lie.

"It was my idea." Justin took responsibility. "We just wanted to freak out Chad and Mikayla so that they wouldn't want to…." He paused. "I'm sorry." He then saw Max with his wand and the script; he jerked his brother's wand away from him. "What are you doing?"

"I've got to see how it ends!" Max still failed to see the danger in reliving the movie.

"Dad…" Alex looked back to her father. "Wouldn't you getting your wizard powers back affect Uncle Kelbo?"

"No, honey…" Jerry started following the kids out of the lair. "It's not like…" He heard another person and looked back. Lifting himself off the floor, Jerry's brother looked bewildered and out of it. When Jerry had married Theresa, he had received the family wizard over his sister and mad the most of them in everything. Lifting himself up, he recognized where he was and staggered around once before recognizing his brother, sister-in-law and niece and nephews.

"Did anyone feel that?" He looked as if he was about to pass out. "I lost my wizard powers for minute there over China." His eyes rolled back and he crashed backward into the shop floor.


	9. Chapter 9

9

"Kelbo, more pancakes?" It was Saturday morning and Theresa made her family a nice breakfast. Her brother-in-law, of course, was never one to shirk a good meal or a good story. Over the table on the top landing, Justin regaled him in the last few weeks' sequence of events concerning the movie to be filmed in the shop over the summer, the mystery of Miranda and William Russo and the riddle of their history partially documented in his novels.

"Yeah, sure, sis!" Kelbo grinned a big smile to her then turned to Justin. "So let me get this straight…" He sat and listened to his nephew's story. "Sometime back, Justin dated this Goth girl…"

"She wasn't a Goth girl." Justin insisted. "She just dressed in black and listened to loud music."

"Yeah, Goth!" Alex persisted.

"And in the future, she becomes a witch, has a kid then travels back in time with her son to live in our time." Kelbo repeated their story. "Her son also grows up and writes a novel that may or may not bust you as wizards."

"Pretty much…" Alex loved her Uncle Kelbo. He was a lot of fun to be with.

"And you guys think this guy is Justin's future son." Kelbo added.

"Pretty much…" Justin sat with his uncle on the family sofa with his arms crossed. "But she denies it."

"And you believe her?" Kelbo asked his nephew. "Justin, newsflash…. Girls lie all the time!"

"Not all the time…" Alex protested. "Only when we have to!" She lifted another fork of pancakes to her lips.

"So, Justin…" Kelbo lit up at another plate of pancakes. "What are you to do next?"

"I'm going to go see Miranda again." Justin finished his juice off as the last part of his breakfast. "I know William is my future son." He shook his head frustratedly and slumped tiredly in his seat. "He had us down pat; our likenesses in the story perfect. Our personalities were disturbingly accurate… even if he did make me a little…." He fished hesitantly for the right word. "Arrogant."

"No, he got you perfect!" Max disagreed and poured more chocolate syrup on his pancakes. "I just loved it when you met Jason Russell and said, "Please tell me I'm not really as obnoxious as he sounds." " He imitated his brother as best as he could and started cackling uproariously with Alex.

"I'm not conceited!" Justin denied it. "I'm just…. Proud." He rose from his seat.

"Please tell me I'm not really as obnoxious as he sounds." Alex was now imitating Justin's self-discovery and started laughing louder.

"Mom!" Justin looked to his mother trying to load the dishwasher.

"Oh, Justin," Theresa sighed and strolled back over to the table. "You got to admit, every once in a while you do get to be a bit unbearable." She noticed Kelbo already down to his last bite of pancakes. "More pancakes, Kelbo?"

"I better not, Theresa…" Her brother-in-law patted his stomach and sipped his chocolate milk. "I'm supposed to be on a diet!"

"Mom," Justin lifted his big brown eyes hopefully to his mother. "I gotta try again to get the truth from Miranda; can you tell dad I'm going to see her again."

"Justin…" Theresa faced him down. "Every time you guys come back from her, you guys return scuffed, bruised and sore. How many times do you want to be mystically tossed out of her house?"

"I'm going too!" Alex spoke up.

Theresa made a face of defeat and disdain.

"Great…." Justin looked at Alex coming to join him. "Everything ends so well when you come along." He responded sarcastically.

"Stuff it, Justin!" Alex pulled out her wand. "Transportus Immortus, William Russo's Boston home…" The loft around them warped away again in a maze of twisted colors distorted in smoke and lights and untwisted back into the New England Colonial parlor of William's Boston home. Miranda's cat screeched and rushed from the room. Sitting in the chair at her fireplace, the ageless sorceress relaxed by the flames in the fireplace as Boston experienced a light rain. She lifted her head to her young former classmates, tugged her glasses from her face and made a light annoyed noise.

"Oh, great…." Miranda groaned. "You're back again. You know… I was worried you might not come to see me again, but… there you are!" She reacted sarcastically.

"You lied." Justin was upset. "Tell me the truth, Miranda. William is my son, isn't he?"

"We were actually in his story!" Alex's voice was annoyed and acidic. "He described us perfectly! He had everything perfect! There is no way he created those stories based on a few vague dreams."

"I didn't lie." Miranda tossed her book through the air, and it retook its place on the shelf. "I said he wasn't your son."

Justin and Alex looked at each other and contemplated the alternate solution.

"With Max?" Alex made a face of stunned disgust. "Ewwwww…"

"No!" Miranda gestured and grabbed another book flying at her through the air. "Now, do you mind? You guys may still be teenagers in this time, but I've got other responsibilities than indulging your bad wizard habits."

"How does William know about us, Miranda?" Justin stood and glared at her.

"I'm sorry…" Miranda moved from the parlor area of the house toward the kitchen. "But all questions must be saved for the end of the tour. The front door is in that direction…"

"How would you like me to…" Alex pulled her wand out and received a violent electrical shock from touching it. "Ow!" Her eyes looked back at Miranda smiling at her with a slight toss of her long dark hair. Holding her hand close to her chest, she rubbed her fingers. It felt as if she had grabbed a car battery. Justin stood before her.

"You're not going to tell us how he knows about us, are you?" He realized the truth. "Because it's connected to how he's related to us."

"I'm sorry, but I'm trifle deaf in this ear." Miranda eccentrically humored him. "Now, will you be leaving by force or by free will?" She beamed nonthreateningly. She heard something hit the floor. Miranda's cat had jumped on to the kitchen counter and into her arms. Alex had picked up a plate and dropped it on purpose.

"Whoops?" She was playing a game she enjoyed called blackmail. "I wonder how much of your nice things are going to get broken before you tell us the truth."

"Don't touch my stuff, Alex…" Miranda stroked her cat. "Some of this stuff I've enchanted."

"Oh, I'm really scared…." Alex began indiscriminately poking, touching and palming objects from the pictures to the plants to the bric-a-brac. "What are they going to do? Jump up and bite me?"

"Miranda…" Justin tried using logic. "If William isn't our son, then why does he have my name?"

"Why not?"

Alex pretended to drop another decorative plate from the kitchen cabinet.

"Whoops!" She giggled delicately with a little grin. Miranda's cat hissed at Alex.

"Alex, stop breaking her dishes!" Justin tried stopping her. "Miranda… please? Why are you keeping this a secret from me? Did something happen between us?"

"Here, Justin," Alex noticed a crystal ball on a solid brass base and took it off the top shelf of the cabinet. "How many pieces do you think this will break into?" She cupped the ball in her hand and started swooning. Her mind was being barraged by multiple visions and prophecies she couldn't take. The glass ball was not just enchanted, it had been brought back from the future. It had been enchanted by Miranda using her precognitive abilities upon it. All Alex could do was stand witnesses to her entire future being forced upon her from within it. Faces and names and events overwhelmed her senses. Through several years of experiences, only a few stood out to her. For a moment she was back at the shop and Mason was before her. He was a young British heir who had traveled the world searching for a cure of his werewolf curse. The last time she had seen him, he had been permanently transformed into a full wolf due to the family curse between his family and that of Juliet's family, but their reunion was not a happy occasion.

"Mason, " Alex was tired of him. "I can't take your jealous side any more! We're through!"

"Alex…" The young heir implored her. "I'm sorry… it's just the…"

"Werewolf curse in you?" Alex was livid. "You use that as an excuse for everything!"

"But I love you."

"And I don't…" Alex returned a necklace to him. "Not anymore…"

The vision changed and Alex was not in the shop but in the loft. She was a bit older, some time after Mason had left her, and she was in danger. Her parents and brothers were trapped, their feet stuck to the floor by the wizard comptroller known as Jerold Flick. He was a tall thin figure with a thin hairline and wire glasses just slightly perched on his nose. Dressed in a violet jacket and tan corduroy pants, he looked like the father of Willie Wonka. With the Russo family stuck to the floor, Flick raised his wand to Alex.

"Alex Russo!" He stood before her. "I find thee without humanity or compassion! I'm therefore permanently stripping you of your mystical powers!"

"Alex!" Justin tossed his wand to Alex for her to save herself, but Flick batted it out of the air before could touch it. Before Alex could rationalize what was happening, the vision had changed. She wasn't in the shop or the loft. She was in the studio apartment of a former chapel off Park Avenue surrounded and filled by her artwork. Max was older too. He was just as tall as Justin was now, sporting a goatee with short hair and sitting in a leather chair across from Alex on a large sofa. She was sitting across from him with her dainty hands around his. She was twenty-seven years old.

"Max…" Alex looked at her younger brother. "I'm marrying Kevin. I'm letting you be the family wizard…."

"What?" A big goofy grin rushed to her brother's face. "Yes! Yes! It's my turn now!" He held the wand up as if it were Excalibur. When it exploded, the vision had changed again, and Alex was five years older and in a hospital bed in Los Angeles, California. A large sheet was spread across her legs spread wide and her husband, Kevin Mitchell, was by her side trying to remind her of her breathing exercise. Her son, Nicholas, was being born. Her face was sweating, her hair was drenched and it felt as if her body was being pulled inside out.

"Screw natural childbirth!" Alex pulled Kevin into her face. "Give me the epidural!"

"Alex, you told me…."

"The epidural!" Alex's eyes rolled back into her head. "Now!" She was screaming louder than she had ever screamed before in her life. The pain vanished from her body when she jumped other into the future closer to when Miranda had traveled back. It was another five years later and Alex was an actress in Hollywood. She sat on the floor of the living room of her California home, squeezing her three-year-old daughter, Sophie. Four-year-old Nick played with cars a few feet away. Tears were streaming down her face. Kevin was there too. He guided a police detective into the house who stood over her with unpleasant news.

"Mrs. Russo…" The Los Angeles detective knew her by the name she acted under. "We identified the woman who took your son. We believe it's someone you may know…."

"Who?" Alex was grieving for a son the hospital had misplaced.

"Miranda Hampson…" The detective showed a photo faxed from New York City. "She went to school with you and President Russo on the East Coast…" The vision blinked out at the moment left Miranda had escaped her future by traveling into the past, and Alex swooned backward again. She was back in Boston in the modern day. Her eyes panned William Russo's house again. It took her a minute to realize where she was. Several years of memories had flooded her mind in a few seconds, but in that instance she realized William wasn't Justin's son… he was hers!

"No…" Alex was slowly forgetting the majority of the visions she had seen, but a few held close to her. "No, it's not true…" What maturity she had gained in that mystical psychic barrage was getting replaced by the personality of her youthful selfish counterpart once more. "It can't be true…" She tried to get her bearings as the crystal ball slipped from her fingers to the floor, bouncing slightly but not shattering. "Justin, he's not your son! He's my son!" Her face congealed with the pain and heartbreak she had felt in the future… she was going to get Mason back if but to drive him off? She was going to give her wizard powers to Max? Justin was going to be President of the United States? She was going to marry a guy she had only dated once? Have children? One of them was going to be abducted? Her eyes looked at Miranda filled with tears. "She stole him!"

Justin looked back to Miranda Russo.

"Looks like someone's been having visions…" Miranda stroked her cat and tossed its rubber mouse into the foyer to pursue and bring back to her. She picked up her crystal ball and rose slowly, returning it to her base and returning it to the shelf. She looked to Alex and back to Justin.

"Justin, if you want to know the truth, I guess I have to tell you." She turned away embarrassed. "But after my parents died, I was messed up for a while…" She paused eager to tell the truth. "I was dabbling in drugs and alcohol, I was married to a guy who divorced me when I got pregnant, but when I miscarried my little boy… I lost it. I had a complete mental breakdown and spent two months in a hospital on suicide watch, but when I heard Alex and her husband were expecting their third child, I took him to replace my baby boy." She confessed awkwardly embarrassed and looked to Alex wandering around in a daze. "Alex, I'm so sorry, but I love William just as much as if he was my real son. Please don't take him away from me. I love him so much! He completes me!"

"So that's why he knows all about us!" Justin scoffed trying not to believe it. "Because of our wizard heritage, he's developed a psychic link with Alex and her memories when you brought him from the future!"

"Dad!" Alex was recalling her father's funeral years before it had happened. She dropped to the floor of the laundry room crying her heart out. Mason, her father, her mother, the loss of her second son… Too many memories, she couldn't take so many unhappy memories at once. Her heart screamed from the sadness. Why did she pick that crystal ball to try and break?

"Miranda!" Justin took charge. "This is your fault! Take those memories away from Alex; she shouldn't have discovered what the future has for her."

"That's not her future she's living…" Miranda welcomed her Siamese running back. "That's my past. What happens now is up to her. Just as Harper from one future changed the time stream, so as I have changed it again. Maybe Mason stays with her this time."

"Make her forget them!"

"I guess I'll have to." Miranda placed her cat on the countertop and descended down to the floor where Alex grieved events that had only happened in her head. Clinging to the door of the mud porch, Alex felt Miranda coming up next to her. Her sorrowful eyes turned to her. Miranda's matured visage came upon her as if she were an eccentric aunt. Their eyes met each other.

"Alex…" The older woman stroked the hair of the younger girl. "Look into my eyes and let go of your emotions. Your thoughts are a river pouring into mine; my mind is an ocean flowing into yours. Let me in and take away your sadness. You will forget everything that has happened to you… Listen to my voice and let go of the pain…" Her hand rubbed away Alex's tears from her face. The young sorceress's mind was drifting away as the sound of Miranda talking to her became the only sound in her head…


	10. Chapter 10

10

A certain New England writer was finally at peace with the world. After writing numerous short little subjects with the Jason and Ashley Russell characters, his creations were slowly becoming real through the creative talents at Orion Studios. He had been present when Mikayla was there to practice with the wirework. Using a counterbalance for her weight, the stunt men had her climbing up a wall for the highlights of what was going to be the movie's scariest and most intense scenes. They had her hanging and standing upside down from ceilings, doing mid-air cartwheels and extensive physical activities for the mystical fight scenes with Chad Dylan Cooper playing her brother Jason. She loved every moment of it, but when it came to her demonic transformation in the movie, she sided with William that she did not want prosthetic appliances to her face to make her look inhuman. The special effects team wanted her to look more and more demonic as her character degenerated into a demon, but William's original vision was that contact lenses, subtle make-up and lighting tricks with strange camera angles could be used to make her look sinister. Not only that, but the studio could save much more money without having to create and throw away numerous prosthetic appliances.

On his way home, he took a cab down to Battery Park where a helicopter would take him to his flight to Boston. Unfortunately, the way down Lexington was impeded by traffic and his cab ride was re-routed over to Waverly. Sitting in the backseat, he checked his messages on his cell phone and tried calling his mother, but she didn't seem available. In the front seat, Aswang Obadji tried paying attention to the traffic and the lights as he indulged in small talk with the screenwriter in his cab with his heavy Sudanese accent.

"So, Stephen King, do you know him?"

"I've met him, but we're not on a first name basis." William confessed.

"How about…" Aswang tried to think of another famous writer. "Oh, that, uh… what's her name? Oh, J.K. Rowling! I really love her stuff."

"No, I've never met her." William grinned from the attention. "But I do know William Collins, the horror writer. We talk a lot on Twitter."

"He's good, but I like his fantasy stuff a lot more." Aswang noticed the red light turn green and started driving forward. "So, do you ever wonder if all that magic stuff could be real?"

"I wonder about it all the time." William looked up toward the dark nighttime sky through the sunroof of the cab then casually looked to his left. The green and light tan sign for Waverly Place Sub Sandwich had caught his interest for some reason and sparked a reaction. He had never been to Lower Manhattan before and, yet, he felt he'd seen it before. The place was lit up with lights, customers sitting inside and coming in and out. The bright green neon lights read "Sandwiches, Salads and Snacks." How did he know this place, and why did he feel he had been here before?

"Driver, could you pull over?" He asked Obadji. Looking at the fare, he pulled on a twenty and a ten from his wallet and grabbed his knapsack at his feet.

"Want me to wait?" Aswang took the tip.

"No, I'm good…" Somehow, William Russo felt he'd been here before, but only in his dreams, and even then, he knew it as Mystical Burgers and Sodas. His pack tossed over his shoulder, he stepped from the cab into the cold night air and stood before the sandwich shop. It shouldn't exist, and yet, here it was.

"Oh my god…." William Russo came wandering into the sub shop. "This is so surreal." He came in through the doors and turned around admiring the sub shop. The blue green walls, the benches to the right of the entry, the raised platform in the corner to the second entrance… he'd seen in all before in his dreams. He'd been here in his dreams along with Ashley Russell. As a teenager himself, he and Jason Russell would race up and down the circular staircase to the apartment upstairs. Maxine would hide under the tables trying to scare him. He had been here before alright, but only in his dreams… To find this place existed in the real world was more than he could imagine. He wondered if he'd find Ashley waiting for him in a nice dress. Would Terri Russell invite him for dinner? Would Larry Russell indulge him with a few magic tricks? Looking up casually from cleaning a table, Justin looked up briefly then again, freezing in place upon seeing him. Turning around with a big grin, he and William locked eyes on each other.

"Justin?" William recalled him. "Oh my God… You're here? You live in Manhattan?"

"Uh…."

"Justin, I can't read your mother's…" In the window to the kitchen, Jerry tried reading another order by Theresa and locked eyes on William then ducked down to hide out of view.

"Mr. Smith?" William recognized Justin's father, scoffed out of disbelief and looked around the five customers in the shop. "What's going on here?"

"Heh, uh, wow…" To Justin, this was almost as bad as getting busted as a wizard. "Uh, Mr. Russo, there is a very logical reason for all of this." He made an awkward face. "I just need to figure out what it is…." He looked to his father for help.

"Forget it, Alex…" Theresa was coming down from the loft above the shop from the circular staircase with Alex and Harper behind her. Harper had dyed her hair dark like Alex's hair, but that was not what the argument was about. "You're not going back to the Dolphin to shave Mikayla's head." She didn't look ahead of her in the shop. "I don't care if she's playing you in a movie, you've just got to…" She finally looked up stunned and shocked to William Russo standing in the middle of the shop. Jerry and Justin started freaking out. She has just basically announced to William that Alex and Harper were the people in his dreams. Maybe, just maybe, he didn't hear that part….

"Excuse me?" William stood there grinning. Behind him, Justin started having a panic attack and stopped to check his pulse and heartbeat. Jerry felt as if he was having a stroke on top of a heart attack.

"I-I-I…." Theresa stood before the writer. "I've… You… You're William Russo! I'd know you anywhere!" She saw Alex's face in him and a bit of Jerry and her brother Ernesto. Although Alex had forgotten everything about the future and her connection to William, Justin had told the truth to her and Jerry. Before Theresa, she recognized her grown grandson.

"Yes, I am…" William felt a strange bond to these people. "Do we know each other?"

"Yes…yes, we do…" Jerry calmed and got over his shock as Justin hyperventilated into a paper bag. "William, I'm going to tell you the truth!"

"Dad!" Alex freaked.

"Alex, catch me…" Harper started swooning about to faint, but instead, it was Justin who hit the floor. Everyone looked to him on the floor as two customers ignored the drama and ate their sandwiches.

"No, I'm telling him the truth." Jerry walked out and faced down his twenty-two year old grandson. "William, we didn't visit you because of your success as a writer." He looked to Theresa cringing, and Alex and Harper covering up their faces in terror. "We did it because…" He paused. William looked at him.

"I'm your Uncle Jerry Russo!" Jerry finally forced the lie. "Your father was my brother, Thomas Russo!"

"That's it!" Justin hopped up off the floor. "That's it! I just had to meet you, Uncle William!" Justin faked some sincerity. "Welcome to Waverly Place!" He turned overly dramatic.

"William!" Theresa caught her breath and hugged the writer. "Welcome home, son!"

"But my mother said my father's name was Justin…." William commented.

"Justin Thomas Russo…" Jerry lied again. "Or Thomas Justin Russo… he never liked his first name. He went by the name Justin his whole life before… we lost him." Jerry and the family paused for a fake moment of respect. "Did your mother ever tell you how he died?"

"Yeah, " William looked to his new relatives. "With the 11th Marine Infantry in the Gulf War…" He told the story his mother had told him and everyone pretended to recall the solemn incident with another moment of peace. "But why didn't just tell me…."

"Well, would have believed us?" Justin took up the rest of the lie. "I mean…" He was rationalizing like crazy. "You had just become famous… we didn't want you think all we wanted was your money."

"That's it!" Alex confirmed it as Max came out of the lair behind the shop kitchen. Harper was quickly explaining the lie to Max. The young wizard scowled a bit and tried to understand it.

"But there's isn't a Thomas…" Max cried out and Alex and Harper suddenly tackled him and dragged him into the kitchen again.

"What'd he say?" William asked.

"Oh, uh, Max is too young to have known your dad!" Theresa added a bit more to their cover story then looked back to William. "William, it is so great to finally meet you!" She hugged him again.

"You sure are a very hugging family."

"Uncle William!" Max now got it and came to meet the new screenwriter in the family. Alex stood behind her brother and placed her hand to her head in embarrassment. If there was a way to overdo anything, Max was going to find it. "Can I ask you a question? If you was on a train heading to Hollywood at forty miles an hour from Nashville, and Alex was traveling to Hollywood on a train fifty miles an hour from…."

"Go! Go!" Theresa pulled Max back and shooed him away from William. The family had just perpetuated the biggest lie to cover up their wizard heritage, and yet, no one felt bad about it. They all felt warm and fuzzy about it. It was a really odd feeling for them. They really weren't that loving of a family; they looked after each other and covered up their feelings, but no one ever really shared their emotions. When Alex forced herself to give her older relative a hug, she felt a twinge of memories trying to come back to her. She felt something stronger as her heart started pounded a bit more. It wasn't like she was attracted to him; it was as if there was a bond there that she should have remembered. Why couldn't she remember it? She hugged him platonically and then started briefly pulling away before doing it right a second time. A strange tear dropped down her face. Why was she feeling this way?

"Justin…" Jerry had an inkling of what was happening and turned to his son. "Are you sure Miranda removed all those memories of the future from Alex?" Jerry whispered to his son.

"Positive." Justin guessed. "Maybe it's just a residual feeling…" He theorized. "Maybe the emotions to them stayed behind but not the memories…" They looked back as Alex pushed herself away from her new relation.

"Wow…" William grinned to his new cousin. "Usually only my mom hugs me like that."

"I'm sorry…" Alex's pulled her hair back demurely and disconcerted. "I don't know why I did that." She drifted backward confused and befuddled. What was wrong with her?

"William, honey…" Theresa broke the awkward moment. "If you're not in a hurry, I'd love to have you stay and tell me about yourself."

"I'd like that." The writer grinned again and checked his watch. "I'm supposed to catch a fight to Boston, but I can take a later flight. So…" He paused as Theresa guided him to a booth. "Do you have any photos of my father? You know, my mother lost all of hers…"

"Yeah, sure…. Somewhere…." Theresa shot a look to Jerry who looked to Justin. Max meanwhile was heading to talk to his new relative.

"Hey, Uncle William…" Max headed over. "Do you like gladiator movies?"

"Photos?" Justin freaked again in secret. "Photos?"

"There's a spell to fake photos." Jerry whispered back as another customer entered the shop. "I'll teach it to you later."

"What's Miranda going to do when she learns what we did?"

"I'll cross that bridge when I get to it!" Jerry looked back as Theresa told William about her family and she had met him. Alex as still feeling awkward and retreated to the kitchen in the sandwich shop to try and figure out what was wrong with her. She stood by the sink area trying to understand why she wasn't distressed? What happened yesterday when she and Justin confronted her? If William was Justin's son, then why did she have deeper feelings for him? What happened to her yesterday?

"Alex…" The novelty of meeting a screenwriter had worn off, and Harper now felt concerned over her best friend. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, why wouldn't I?" Alex tried to be hard and difficult again. "I mean… so my new cousin is really my nephew from the future…" She looked out to him. "It's not like I care, it's just…" She paused. "Harper, why do I care about him?"

"Well…" Harper nervously risked telling her the truth again. "I don't know… I mean, it's not like I was there when Miranda told you and Justin the truth about him."

"Yeah…" Alex stole a fresh mushroom from the sandwich making area as her father came in to make a sandwich for the new customer. "I mean… you'd always tell me the truth, right?"

"Right." Harper shared a nervous glance with Alex's father. "Speaking of the truth, uh, you wouldn't mind if I didn't go to Disneyland with you and your family?"

Alex stood waiting for the reason behind the change of plans.

"Well," Harper hemmed and hedged a bit as Jerry finished the sandwich, wrapped it and scooped mashed potatoes and Cole slaw for the waiting customer. "You know the other day when you were hiding in the lair during the photo shoot from Mikayla?" She continued. "Well, Mikayla and I started talking, and as it turns out, we both seem to have a lot in common as friends."

"As friends?" Alex couldn't accept it. "You're friends with Mikayla now?"

"Yeah…" Harper confessed. "She even offered me the role of Maxine in "_Witchcraft_." She revealed a bit excited and played with her new long and straightened dark locks. "I'm going to be playing Max as a girl!"

"I don't see it…" Max had entered the kitchen on his way to the lair, but instead, he walked around Harper checking her out in her new dark hair and looking her over as the female version of him. He stopped and looked her in the eyes. "How far can you spit off a bridge?"

"I can hold my own."

"How much more bizarre can this get?" Alex asked herself. Out in the shop, William Russo was describing his youth to Theresa, and Jerry was taking another order for another customer. Justin started cleaning tables and putting up chairs to get ready for closing. It was Max's turn to mop the floor tonight. As Justin came out of the subway car extension in the front of the building, he heard the doors of the shop. They seemed to get a lot of customers toward this time, but this person he knew. He recognized the figure, the long dark hair and boots.

"Hey, Justin…"

"Miranda!" Justin recognized her. She was young and eighteen again, dressed in a white blouse with a leather jacket and blue jeans, her long dark hair cascading down over her shoulders, but was it really her or was she just young again? She reached and hugged him with a kiss to the cheek.

"I'm in town visiting my grandmother and thought I come see what you were up." She told him. "So, I hear you're dating someone named Juliet."

"Yeah…." Justin looked back to his parents. "But we're sort of… separated now." He put a twist on the truth.

"So, you want to do something?" Miranda asked.

Justin looked back to his dad.

"Sure…" He got a silent gesture of permission from his father. "Dad, I'll be back later." He gestured behind him as he went out the door. Jerry waved at him knowing he was going to behave himself. Coming out of the kitchen, Alex just brooded at the counter looked to her fake cousin trying to get away and then back to her brother and that girl through the side windows heading left past the door toward the square. The ingredients of the future were briefly united if but still separated by circumstance.

"Justin, I love my new school!" Miranda pulled Justin close as they passed the hardware store. "It's so much nicer than Tribeca Prep. There's this girl there named Sabrina Borden who claims to be a witch. She says she can teach me a few spells."

"A few spells?" Justin realized that's how it must have started with her. "Are you sure you want to get into something like that?"

"Justin, it's not like it's…." She stopped and looked over to Waverly Presbyterian Church then paused a bit distracted. "That's weird, I thought I just saw someone who looked like my Aunt Connie." They stopped and looked over to the church. The gated enclosure was empty, the lights within the chapel illuminating the grounds, a secondary light lighting up the bulletin board out front. As the two teens continued onward to the arcade, a shadow moved and fifty-three year old Miranda Russo stepped out adorned in a long black dress. She looked to her younger counterpart heading off with Justin.

"That's it, girl…" She mumbled under breath. "Just like it happened the first time…. Only this time do it right…"

END


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